tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9141912591194930582018-02-01T03:00:07.265-08:00Illuminating GamesChris' thoughts, rants, and essays on the world of gamingChris Farrellhttps://plus.google.com/107526139736953433093noreply@blogger.comBlogger134125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-914191259119493058.post-61922996797758620802014-04-07T10:02:00.003-07:002014-04-07T10:02:57.833-07:00Freedom: The Underground Railroad<i style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #3f3f3f; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 27px;">If you haven't switched over to </span></span><a href="http://illuminatinggames.wordpress.com/2014/04/07/freedom-the-underground-railroad/" style="color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px;">my WordPress blog</a><span style="color: #3f3f3f; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 27px;">&nbsp;yet,&nbsp;now is the time!</span></span></i><br /><br /><span style="color: #3f3f3f; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 27px;"><i>I can also be found on <a href="http://illuminatinggames.tumblr.com/">Tumblr</a>&nbsp;now, and as usual I'm on <a href="https://twitter.com/cfarrell317">Twitter</a> and <a href="https://plus.google.com/107526139736953433093">G+</a>.</i></span></span><br /><br /><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">There are a fairly&nbsp;limited number of core go-to backdrops&nbsp;for games: railroad building, renaissance Italy, Imperial Rome, the Age of Exploration, and trading in central Europe between 1500 and 1800 are the usual suspects.&nbsp;Generic Tolkienesque fantasy and generic sci-fi round out the mix. Freedom: The Underground Railroad is a refreshing break, chronicling as it does the struggles of a marginalized people against oppression during&nbsp;a particularly disgraceful&nbsp;period of American history.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Players take on the role of abolitionists in the northern United States from 1800 through the beginning of The War Against Slavery&nbsp;(1861). They have the dual goals of freeing slaves from southern plantations and smuggling them into Canada, and building the financial and political support required for the eventual destruction of the institution of slavery in the United States. Each turn, players free slaves from plantations and move them&nbsp;along the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_railroad" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Underground Railroad</a>, stopping in American cities before eventually finding freedom in&nbsp;Canada, all while trying to dodge the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_catchers" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">slave catchers</a>&nbsp;who are moved&nbsp;randomly by the game system. Along the way, the presence of freed slaves can generate cash and support political fundraising.&nbsp;That cash can then either be used to further the operations of the Underground Railroad (buying conductor tokens, which power all this&nbsp;movement in the first place), buy the political support required to win, or activate historical Abolitionist personalities and organizations made available&nbsp;from a deck of cards. If the players can free a target number of slaves and gain enough political support as indicated by the number of players and difficulty level, they win. If time runs out, or if too many slaves end up on the plantations, they lose.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">As a cooperative game, this all works quite satisfactorily. Players&nbsp;have different roles (Stockholder, Preacher, Agent, Conductor, Station Master) which give them special powers and some individuality. Cash is held by the individual player, not the group, and can’t be transferred, so there is a need to balance&nbsp;keeping each of the players’ options open as well as furthering the interests of the group. The tactical game of moving slaves north while dodging slave-catchers is a little more about chess-like evasive maneuvers&nbsp;than it is about risk-taking or pushing your luck, which seems a little inauthentic – but there is still enough depth to engage the multiple minds and spark interesting discussions as the players seek optimal moves. The flow of historical personalities, organizations, and events provides some nice historical touchstones. The base difficulty level is probably a little easy for&nbsp;the hobbyists who will be the primary audience for this game, so&nbsp;I do recommend the harder victory conditions to start. I also think the game’s playing time probably exceeds its range of experience unless you are really smooth cooperative game players, but it’s not by a lot. Freedom certainly isn’t on the level of the classics in the genre (Lord of the Rings, Pandemic, Forbidden Island, maybe Robinson Crusoe) when it comes to tight pacing and keeping all the players constantly engaged, but again, you can’t play those games&nbsp;<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">all</em>the time and Freedom does attempt to&nbsp;cover a&nbsp;real historical period where not just real lives but the soul&nbsp;of a nation&nbsp;was&nbsp;at stake. That is Freedom’s most important and distinctive feature.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">After my first play, I admit my impressions of how&nbsp;well Freedom succeeded in this&nbsp;were negative. It felt like it over-promised and under-delivered. The&nbsp;box art promises adventure, giving you a picture of a family of escaped slaves sneaking to freedom through the dark, armed and surrounded by unknown threats with nary a white person in sight. The game’s actual narrative, though, is the moral crusade of the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolitionist#United_States" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">mainly white, privileged northern abolitionists</a>. The (escaped) slaves themselves&nbsp;don’t have a point of view in the game; they are just cubes being moved around at the players’ whims. The real pressure the players feel in practice is not to free as many slaves as possible, but instead is to raise as much money as possible to fund operations and buy all the support tokens which abstractly represent political clout. The event and personality cards tend to work in broad strokes (reducing the cost of buying tokens, moving extra slaves cubes, bonus cash), and so are a little flat except that some (Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglas) are better than others (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Greenleaf_Whittier" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">John Greenleaf Whittier</a>). This is a frustratingly common pattern, trying to tell the stories of the oppressed not through their own eyes, but through the privileged white outsiders trying to rescue them. In this case, it’s a game not about the people&nbsp;<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">on</em>&nbsp;the Underground Railroad but the people<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">financing</em>&nbsp;the Underground Railroad. Attempting the former would be something unquestionably worth doing. The latter, while set in an important historical period, feels pretty much the same as every other game out there: tactical positioning and resource management by&nbsp;privileged white&nbsp;Europeans, primarily men, designed by and for those same people.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">My attitude softened with time, though. I played with a couple guys who never realized that slaves had to get all the way to Canada to be free, so I got to&nbsp;explain the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1850" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Fugitive Slave Act</a>&nbsp;and its importance as&nbsp;one of the causes&nbsp;of the Civil War. Prominent black and female abolitionists are well-represented in the abolitionist deck, and are nice touchstones that&nbsp;give the knowledgeable some conversation material, and the whole presentation can&nbsp;spark the curiosity of an interested player.&nbsp;The flavor text on the cards&nbsp;is in&nbsp;too small a type size to read under game conditions, but the historical illustrations and photos are nicely evocative. One shouldn’t allow the excellent to be the enemy of the good; just because Freedom had a real&nbsp;opportunity to try to push the gaming envelope in an overwhelmingly white, male hobby but&nbsp;decided to play it safe and by-the-numbers instead shouldn’t necessarily lead us to judge it more harshly.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">So after my initial disappointment, I came to like it. I think a key to appreciating the game for me was reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s excellent&nbsp;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743270754/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0743270754&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=illumigames-20" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Team of Rivals</a>, which inspired me to try the game after my initial&nbsp;so-so impressions. The book covers not just Lincoln and his cabinet but also focuses&nbsp;on the balance Lincoln had to maintain between the hard-line anti-slavery forces (represented in the book by Salmon Chase primarily and, indirectly, William Seward’s wife Francis) and the anti-immigrant and sectarian&nbsp;factions (who might be against the spread of slavery but were not abolitionists and for whom it was not a voting issue) in the Republican party. For me, coming into Freedom with&nbsp;a little knowledge of&nbsp;the fundamental, complicated, and lethal&nbsp;social conflict&nbsp;in&nbsp;this period of US history gave me the leverage I needed to enjoy the game for what it is. It’s too bad it&nbsp;doesn’t stand on its own a bit better, using the gaming form itself to more strongly convey a unique&nbsp;narrative viewpoint. But the fact of the matter is&nbsp;that Freedom tries, and while perhaps it doesn’t achieve everything one might hope for, it is still at the very least a qualified success, and does&nbsp;make a strong statement. It’s surprising to me how few games do.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00HCHRGNI/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=B00HCHRGNI&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=illumigames-20" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Freedom: The Underground Railway</a>&nbsp;is&nbsp;<a href="http://www.wargamer.com/article/3501/interview-making-freedom-the-underground-railroad" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">designed by Brian Mayer</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://academygames.com/games/freedom-series/freedom-the-underground-railroad" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">published by Academy Games</a>.</div>Chris Farrellhttps://plus.google.com/107526139736953433093noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-914191259119493058.post-84156570711253841752014-03-21T11:17:00.002-07:002014-03-21T11:18:10.003-07:00Caverna<i style="color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px;">(I have moved over to WordPress –&nbsp;<a href="http://illuminatinggames.wordpress.com/2014/03/21/caverna/" style="color: #888888; text-decoration: none;">check out the new digs</a>&nbsp;if you want to get join the discussion)</i><br /><i style="color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px;"><br /></i><br /><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Agricola hasn’t come off the shelf in ages in my game groups. Interestingly, it seems like the game&nbsp;feature that gave it its initially high replayability (the vast array of occupation and improvement cards) is also the feature that eventually killed it, aided and abetted by PlayDek’s excellent&nbsp;<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/agricola/id561521557?mt=8" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">iOS implementation</a>. Playing quick games on the iPad – especially the solo challenges – by removing all the physical hassles of setup, moving bits around, and idly waiting for other players, makes it really apparent just how big a deal getting a good hand of cards is and how completely screwed you are by a mediocre hand. There is just no way to get the points you need to advance in the solo challenges if you didn’t get good cards. Using a draft to build your initial hand can help amongst highly experienced, similarly-skilled players, but it’s not a panacea.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Still, even though Agricola was always about a 7-rated game for me, I still had &nbsp;fun with it for a while and it’s easy to understand why most gamers enjoy it. Building a farm is fun. The game understands the rules of&nbsp;<a href="http://illuminatinggames.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/hamlets-hit-points-for-boardgamers/" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" title="Hamlet’s Hit Points for Boardgamers">Hamlet’s Hit Points</a>&nbsp;and does a good job of maintaing tension throughout. The large number of cards do provide a lot of exploration fun. For several years&nbsp;it was a constant table presence. So I was onboard for Caverna when it came out.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">If you’ve played Agricola, you basically know how to play Caverna: use your family members to plow fields, fence pastures, and get animals. Now, though, half your player board dedicated to mining and tunneling, which work how you would expect. There are action spaces for digging tunnels and caverns, furnishing rooms, and mining ore and rubies. Since we’re representing a family of dwarves now, there are also spaces for turning the ore you mine into weapons and going on adventures to pillage stuff (uneventful adventures admittedly, as they are completely risk-free, but still).</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Although the decoration of both the physical components and the game systems are quite different between the two games, there are really just two big, fundamental differences.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Firstly, the harvest/feeding cycle has been both accelerated and made slightly more forgiving. You now will have to feed your family after most turns, so that’s tricky. On the other hand, most of the mechanics for turning stuff into food have either been eliminated or greatly simplified. Vegetables and animals just turn into food without the need to acquire fancy stoves. There is no “bake” action; if you want a better food exchange rate you just build a room in your cave (say the Brewery) that helps and it just does its thing without having to take an action. So there is substantially less time and fewer resources spent with the mechanics of producing food, which leaves more time for other things (mining and adventuring mainly).</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Secondly, the hand of 14 cards you were dealt at the start of Agricola are gone. Replacing them are a tableau of 47 distinct furnishing tiles, rooms you can build in your cave. These all give either special powers (improving food production, animal husbandry, or mining operations; making weapons or other furnishings cheaper; and so on) or endgame victory points.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">On the good side, the game feels more open, like the players have more flexibility to follow interesting and varied strategies without always being under the hammer of food pressure. In Agricola traditionally the first third to half (or more) of the game is mostly about establishing a food engine, which is mostly about playing the hand you’ve been dealt and/or trying to find an underexploited niche in the strategy space and is honestly not all that interesting. If you can do this you get to be a meaningful participant in the later portion of the game, where you try to diversify. Because you aren’t quite so constrained by food (although food pressure is still considerable), and the mechanics of food production are less involved, Caverna lets you spend more time on development, from an earlier point. With a number of additional ways to go now (adventuring, tunneling, mining for rubies and ore), as a player you feel more in control of your destiny. It’s also possible to do well, or even possibly to win, with a relatively small family.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Unfortunately, for me these good things are more than outweighed by the negatives. The main thing of course is the gargantuan level of up-front complexity. In Agricola you had to figure out what to do with 14 cards, a good number of which could be easily eliminated as impractical or only useful with synergies you didn’t have. Even this is not particularly easy. Caverna has 47 distinct furnishings on the table from the outset, very few of which can be easily dismissed. It’s extremely daunting, and possible to fully process only through repeated play (which creates the problem of making it exceptionally difficult for less experienced players to compete with veterans, to a &nbsp;significantly greater degree even than Agricola). It’s also problematic that these small furnishing tiles have their text in small, low-contrast fonts that are unreadable at a distance and so there is no really good way for most of the players to access this vital game information. Imagine the 10 major improvements from Agricola, but now there are 47 of them and they’re printed on small tiles.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The other major issue is that Caverna, unlike Agricola, is a 100% open-information, completely symmetric worker placement game with limited randomness (and what randomness there is, is global, not individual). This raises all sorts of red flags. With every action space worth the same to everyone (because positions are symmetric), it becomes about system exploits – finding the under-costed or overpowered furnishings or combination of furnishings and figuring out which strategic paths (mining, farming, animal husbandry, adventuring) enjoy the most system support. While it’s true that there are other players playing the game and it may be better to follow a weaker path than compete with everyone else for a stronger one, and since all buildings are unique it’s possible for others to block you by snagging the key combo furnishing you need even if it doesn’t help them, nonetheless this adds up to puzzling, not gaming. Puzzling with insane analysis paralysis potential.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">While it’s true that Agricola could be viewed the same way – as more about figuring out the puzzle of the 14 cards you’ve been dealt – it had the saving grace of being asymmetrical and having hidden information. So it was possible to have to guess about other players’ motivations, and be surprised from time to time. Likewise with everyone pursuing at least slightly different strategic paths as suggested (or dictated) by their cards, the worker-placement game of evaluating each space’s comparative “hotness” could be interesting. By contrast, in Caverna everyone is staring at the same options and the same board state and the only way to be surprised by what anyone else does is if you aren’t really paying attention (or can’t be bothered).</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Because Caverna is complex, and because it does share many appealing features with Agricola (vicarious enterprise building, the constant pressure of feeding your family, exploration of a complex game environment), I did enjoy it for a few games. I burned out very quickly though, and after fewer than 5 games I don’t really have much desire to play it again.</div>Chris Farrellhttps://plus.google.com/107526139736953433093noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-914191259119493058.post-32439186832527504822014-03-18T09:55:00.001-07:002014-03-18T09:55:02.136-07:00High Frontier Colonization<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><i>(I have moved over to WordPress –&nbsp;<a href="http://illuminatinggames.wordpress.com/2014/03/18/high-frontier-colonization/">check out the new digs</a>&nbsp;if you want to get join the discussion)</i></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">High Frontier is one of my very favorite games of the last 5 years, and I realize that somehow I’ve never written anything about in my blog. With the expansion out, it’s time to rectify that.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Four of us sat down to play the Colonization for the first time. It begins much the same as the classic game, with players starting on Earth with a bit of money and grand ambitions, trying to acquire the exotic speculative technology required to explore and economically exploit the solar system. Some of the most esoteric pieces of tech available are the game’s two&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">solar sail</a>&nbsp;thrusters: lightweight and requiring neither fuel nor propellant, but slow-ish and unable to carry much mass in a game that’s mostly about hauling around heavy robotic prospectors and refineries. Also, a major premise of the game is that on-site water is key to exoglobalization. The solar sails are primarily useful for exploring sunwards; as you may have noticed, the sun is hot and so there isn’t much water to be found in the inner system. For all these legitimate reasons, everyone else usually rolls their eyes when these come up, but me, I’m a sucker for a challenge. I snap up the Photon Kite Sail nobody wants, attach it to a Solar-pumped MHD Excimer Laser orbital prospector and start putting together a mission to Mercury. Mercury is tidally-locked with one side facing away from the Sun at all times, and so is believed to have&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(planet)#Surface_conditions_and_.22atmosphere.22_.28exosphere.29" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">significant amounts of water</a>.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The problems with Mercury, like most things in this game, all revolved around gravity. The sun is massive, which makes maneuvering so close to it very difficult. Mercury is also large (on the scale of the asteroids that are the typical targets in High Frontier anyway), so it requires a lot of thrust to land on and take off from. The solar sail solves the problem of getting there by harnessing the solar wind for thrust, but is unable to move that much mass and the tech required to do prospecting is heavy. So it requires two missions – one to put a prospector in orbit, and a second to bring a refinery (I was lucky and got the CVD Molding refinery, a relatively light one). Then you’re presented with a new problem that the sail doesn’t help with at all: getting all that onto the surface. Unlike Mars or Venus, Mercury has no atmosphere to assist by allowing aerobraking. The only thing for it is to bring a powerful thruster or a lot of propellant (i.e., water). Mercury has too much gravity for any of the basic thrusters to land on without the ESA beamed power, and the ESA isn’t in the game, so I’ll need to bring 200,000kg of water to use as propellant for landers instead. So that’s a third trip in and of itself. This is all hugely expensive – I estimate the trips took 4 years each and a total weight of roughly 500,000kg of equipment, fuel, and propellant with a total investment of 20 WT (water tanks), the game’s unit of currency. Each WT represents 40 metric tons of water in LEO. Assuming the cost of the water itself is basically zero, the cost of this mission is roughly that of getting 800,000kg into LEO. By way of comparison, the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISS" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">ISS is about 450,000kg</a>. Wikipedia estimates the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISS#Cost" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">cost of the ISS at $150 billion</a>. There is probably a lot of politically-driven waste in there, but nonetheless, it gives you a sense of what these missions would cost given the current technology for lifting mass into LEO. It’s hard to imagine my Mercury mission coming in at less than $200-250 billion, all with no prospect of any return at all for 20 years. It’s outside the realm of possibility in the immediate future, but it’s not unimaginable. Apple alone almost had that in cash lying around at one point.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Anyway, despite a solar flare wreaking havoc with one mission and pushing the total duration out to about 15 years and causing a 20% cost overrun (yet another hazard of operating so close to the Sun), I got a factory set up on Mercury. This is now where the magic starts to happen. Mercury is a comparatively rare V (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestoid" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Vestoid</a>)-type world, and the metals you can find there can be used to build some fancy high-technology thrusters and refineries. I finally dip into the expansion technology to pick up a Levitated Dipole ^6Li-H Fusion reactor to power an incredibly efficient thruster capable of reaching the outer planets (I’m eying Jupiter) at relatively low cost; its rate of fuel and propellant usage in game terms rounds to zero, although the amount of thrust generated is relatively low (making journeys longer and landing on large bodies difficult). My Mercury factory can also produce a Biophytolytic Algae Farm refinery, so I’m in good shape – only the prospecting tech needs to be manufactured and lifted from Earth.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">One of the cool things about High Frontier is that it really gives you a sense of just how vast our solar system is, and how difficult it is to get to many places (and conversely, where the comparatively low-hanging fruit might be). As you look at Jupiter or Saturn and start counting burns and orbital transfers and how much propellant you need to get there and how much thrust it takes to land, you really feel just how difficult interplanetary travel would be with any technology that is currently at all plausible. Then, once you get your hands on one of the powerful reactors/thrusters in the much more highly speculative expansion, &nbsp;you can feel the options opening up, that maybe, just maybe, you could set up on a moon of Uranus or Neptune, or make the fantastic voyage to the TNOs – things that seemed utterly impossible with the basic tech.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Anyway, once you get a high-efficiency thruster, you fully enter the Colonization phase of the game.&nbsp;The extraterrestrial manufacturing premise of the classic game requires a leap of faith, but not a huge one.&nbsp;It’s much harder to figure out a near-future scenario in which sending people into space makes any sense at all, given the truly enormous costs and risks and the fact that robots are so highly capable. So we need to do some satisfactorily plausible handwaving. The handwaving High Frontier Colonization does is to speculate that there is research that you could do at an extraterrestrial lab that you couldn’t do on Earth for whatever reason – either due to local conditions (vacuum, microgravity, something cool about Io), politics on Earth, or the fact that you’re screwing around trying to create a black hole or a massive fusion explosion and people get nervous when you try do that on or near to the only human habitation in the universe. Given how speculative the game becomes at this point, and the possible political and long-term technological benefits of having off-planet colonies, this works well enough. So the goal becomes setting up a personed lab at a remote science site, typically an exotic moon of Saturn or Jupiter or a comet. People require water, so places like Europa are attractive, but if you really want to support lots of people you’ll want to get to fantastically remote&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Neptunian_object" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">TNO’s</a>&nbsp;where water is plentiful. The&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernal_sphere" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Bernals</a>&nbsp;in which people live are heavy and hard to move – at about 600 tons (with needed generators and radiators) far heavier than anything in the classic game – so in most cases to even start to think about this you’ll need one of the gigawatt thrusters from the expansion.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Which, thankfully, I’ve now got. Like the base game, Colonization opens up a lot once you get a decent exofactory. Planning a mission to Europa is easier now I have a stepping stone on Mercury; the thruster and refinery fuel up and boost off from the factory there and rendezvous in LEO with a prospector built on Earth. The bernal itself has a&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">mass driver</a>, so it can make its own way for a little bit stopping off at tiny but accessible rocks like&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/65803_Didymos" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">65803 Didymos</a>&nbsp;and loading up on dirt for the next “short” hop. On arrival at the Sol-Jupiter Lagrange point, the fusion thruster takes over navigating the gravitational complexities of the Jovian moons, parking the Bernal in orbit around Europa and landing a factory in the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conamara_Chaos" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Conamara Chaos</a>.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Now we’re cooking with gas, as they say. The Bernal around Europa becomes a lab, and the Islamic Refugee colonists in residence there (really, you probably don’t want to ask) can upgrade my gigawatt thruster into a Dusty Plasma terawatt thruster which is even lighter, more efficient, and faster, putting impossibly remote sites in range of exploitation. More importantly, it activates a Future, one of the victory conditions that makes Colonization quite different from the classic game: the Mass Beam Future. I honestly have no idea what this is beyond something that beams potentially a lot of power, but it requires factories on Mercury, Venus, and Io as “push factories” that can send power to remote spacecraft and outposts. Fortunately I’ve already got Mercury, and Io is reasonably accessible to Europa where I can build the technology (a Quantum Cascade Laser)&nbsp;to prospect and industrialize the waterless Venus.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Fulfilling this future and its very large chunk of VPs (12) is well within reach, but after 4½ hours it becomes apparent that Colonization has added a lot of time to High Frontier, and we are done. In fairness, the time required to play classic High Frontier is brought down dramatically with only a little bit of experience; my first game with just the basic rules was 4-5 hours, but after only a few games it settled in for us at about 2&nbsp;hours or so for the 3-player game even with most of the advanced rules. We were a bit rusty on even the basic High Frontier rules after not having played in maybe 6 months, and I would expect experienced Colonization players could do the game in 4-5 hours, which is honestly pretty good given its vast scope (one of the other players was working on the Footfall future, which involves attaching a terawatt thruster to a synodic comet and pointing it at Earth, forcing the other players to turn their orbital prospectors into laser platforms and put warheads on their missile prospectors). But given the time commitment involved in learning the game, how many people are going to be able to become experienced players?</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">I love High Frontier, but after playing it about 20 times between the classic basic and advanced games, it had gotten a little bit tired. As strategies were explored and played out, it developed that asteroid exploration (usually Ceres or Vesta) was the way to win – consistent with the premise of the game, but it meant it ultimately lacked variety. Anything that would open things up again would be welcome.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">So for me, playing Colonization was incredibly entertaining. No longer do you have to just get a couple factories to win, but you probably need to work with Bernals, colonists, high-power and high-efficiency thrusters, and transports, all of which have very different tech requirements from the traditional “cheap exploration-blitz” strategies. Moons of the outer planets, with their lab potential and rarer spectral types, become central to development in the midgame. In the classic game an early factory on a small, common C-type rock might be enough to bootstrap you to victory; now, although the game has become longer, its tableau is also vastly larger and encompasses a much wider variety of legitimate infrastructure bases.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">It also does a few key bits of streamlining to the core game system, including an automated way to cycle the technology cards, less restrictive and much easier-to-play rules for factory products, and doubling the value of the income operation. While seemingly minor, these significantly improve the playability of the game.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Also worth mentioning, High Frontier Colonization will probably – like many Sierra Madre Games – benefit from a little bit of seasoning to taste with house rules. While I like the new event model and the politics rules now seem to work much better than they did in the original expansion, I’m not a huge fan of the occasional glitches and pad explosions and we may house-rule those particular events out at some point. In the classic game we ignored the combat and politics rules, and I think you could do that in Colonization also, although a couple futures may require combat. Shimzu’s and the PRC’s faction powers can be a little bit annoying, and tweaking them very slightly is unlikely to hurt (we play that you can only jump a if you immediately industrialize it, and I’m thinking about making Shimzu’s hand size larger but not unlimited). We also disallow tie bids for anyone except the auctioneer. Anyway, High Frontier is a game that supports modifying a little bit to adapt to your group’s tastes and play style, but – as always – you do want to make sure you know what you’re doing before you fiddle too much.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">All in all, I felt like High Frontier Colonization is very successful at doing what it sets out to do. It’s longer and more complicated, and there is absolutely no way you should try to tackle this without a number of games of classic High Frontier under your belt (if you have a friend who absolutely insists on throwing you into the deep end, play the solitaire scenarios a few times first). But for fans of the original, Colonization is &nbsp;worth it and, if you’re like me, it will help renew this endlessly fascinating game.</div>Chris Farrellhttps://plus.google.com/107526139736953433093noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-914191259119493058.post-46225460961118198702014-03-12T19:44:00.003-07:002014-03-12T19:44:58.664-07:00Numenera: The Beale of Boregal<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><i>(I have moved over to WordPress –&nbsp;<a href="http://illuminatinggames.wordpress.com/2014/03/12/numenera-the-beale-of-boregal/">check out the new digs</a>&nbsp;if you want to get join the discussion)</i></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">I finally got to play some&nbsp;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1939979005/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1939979005&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=illumigames-20" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_parent">Numenera</a>. Kim had played an intro module at<a href="http://www.bigbadcon.com/" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_parent">BigBadCon</a>&nbsp;last October and really enjoyed it, so it wasn’t too hard to talk her into GMing a few sessions for us. She decided to run The Beale of Boregal, the first module from the core book, mixed up a little bit to both more fit her personal style and to be a jumping-off point for a longer arc.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">My character is In Gwen Said (thanks,&nbsp;<a href="http://darkliquid.co.uk/playground/numenera/names/" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_parent">random name generator</a>!), a Graceful Jack who Explores Dark Places. Ousted from the Explorers Guild by a rival and ostracized, Gwen is on the Wandering Walk – a mystical pilgrimage route through the Ninth World with no clear beginning or ending – as a sort of&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkabout" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_parent">walkabout</a>. Gwen links up with fellow-travellers: Kal, a swift jack trying to escape the consequences of the tragic accident that gave him a halo of fire; Vehm, a swift nano who fuses flesh and steel, who found it more convenient to leave town after he killed a high-profile criminal; Millord, the rugged glaive who howls at the moon and is on a quest to restore his family’s fortune; and Meck, the mystical nano who controls beasts and as yet has no backstory despite the best efforts of the character creation system.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The story starts off on the Wandering Walk with the standard meet-and-greet. Gwen and Kal are friends who did some artifact-hunting together in the past; all the other characters turn out, conveniently, to know each other in some way, so that helps. With pleasantries disposed of, the group sights a scutimorph on the horizon, with riders! On the off chance you aren’t familiar with scutimorphs, they are 6 foot high, 12 foot long millipede-like creatures that, as far as anyone knows, are untamable. So that’s kind of odd. The riders turn out to be a teenage boy and his badly wounded&nbsp;younger sister who, it seems, is telepathic or at least empathic. It develops that the two are fleeing a raid on their village, and looking for aid and healing. We don’t have the healing the girl needs, so we arrange for an escort to the spa town down the road while we trudge off to see what we can do for their village.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Said village is in the False Woods, so named (as quickly becomes apparent) because what looks like an orchard from a distance is actually a bunch of identical tubes, all hovering about 2′ off the ground, arrayed in neat rows and columns and supporting a net of some kind. And also, with scutimoprhs wrapped around them. As the villagers are trying to homestead on top of numenera they don’t understand, weird stuff has been happening: villagers are having bad dreams, animals in the vicinity are becoming unusually erratic and/or homicidal, stuff life that. After the nanos in the party spend a little time deciphering the numenera, to everyone’s general amusement, we follow the signs off towards the village of Embered Peaks which we suspect to be the source of the psychic disruption.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">On the way we are ambushed by some Stratherian War Moths (because, if I’m a warped&nbsp;high-level nano wanting to bioengineer some killing machines, the first thing that occurs to me is to start with a moth). These would have been nastier if Kal had not remembered he had a cypher that could produce a large Wall of Cold, turning a highly dangerous encounter into a manageable one. Gwen shows off some archery skills, along with fast defensive maneuvering which leaves the moths blasting their heat rays at shadows.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">On arrival at Embered Peaks, we find the small village in chaos. People are running around in madness. Houses are on fire. Millord detects a survivor in one burning building, and Gwen runs in along with Kal to try to effect rescue. Things start to go wrong when Kal decides throwing a small child out a second story window to safety is probably safe, and ends with Kal clinging to the other survivor and a Reality Spike mounted to nothing 20 feet off the ground while the house collapses around him and Gwen dances back out the front door.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Undeterred, at the heart of town we find a strange cult fiddling while things burn. Embered Peak’s claim to tourist fame is an oracle that supposedly lets people talk with the dead if they are in possession of the corpse, but in a way that a) only allows them to ask one question, and b) the answers are always lies. Gwen thinks this sounds not particularly productive, but whatever. It turns out to be trickier than you might think to formulate a couple of questions to ask that might ascertain the truth of the situation. This turns out to be important, as the numenera that powers this feat (and as a byproduct seems to be driving people in the vicinity to madness) is what looks like a person who has been hooked via tubes and wires to a giant artifact of some kind. The person has probably been there for a very, very long time. It’s really unclear to the party whether the person wants to be disconnected, put out of his misery, or what exactly and whether any of it would put an end to the ongoing situation. The local cultists are (perhaps unsurprisingly) not that helpful. After some back and forth in which Kal is revealed to have a complicated ethical framework, we try disconnecting. This gets awkward when the artifact itself seems reluctant to let its captive/host/symbiote go, and the party must fend off encroaching cables and tubes trying to capture them while disconnecting the captive. Eventually the captive is released! He seems to be a powerful fusion of flesh and numenera, so that’s a little scary, but he also&nbsp;seems grateful and non-homicidal! So that was probably the right answer. Problem solved. What’s next?</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">—</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">I’m a big fan of Monte Cook’s work – my favorite d20-style RPG by far was Arcana Unearthed/Evolved – so I came into Numenera with some confidence, even though the “billion years in the future” and “technology or magic – you decide!” hook didn’t immediately grab me. In the end, the game easily exceeded expectations and I enjoyed it as much as I have enjoyed any RPG I’ve ever played. The character creation process is genius (and easy), the system of GM intrusions is fantastic, and the rest of the system is very lightweight and extremely efficient. The game world of Numenera is rich and engaging. At a high level it has a similar aesthetic to Ashen Stars: take something familiar (the fantasy d20 tradition), and then “reboot” it by introducing a few quirky, disruptive elements to make it novel. Numenera has gone a lot farther down this path than Ashen Stars did, though. It has (like Arcana Evolved before it) jettisoned all the elves, dwarves, gnomes, orcs, and other baggage and completely replaced it with an entirely new, thoroughly-developed world designed both as a compelling fictional setting&nbsp;<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">and</em>&nbsp;as to support the peculiar requirements of the &nbsp;roleplaying genre. The amount of creative effort that has gone into the setting is impressive: from all the strange creatures and races to the cyphers, oddities, and artifacts, there is a ton of depth here and it steadfastly refuses to fall back on cliches. There is a ton to like and I hope to be playing it for quite a while. I&nbsp;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1939979005/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1939979005&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=illumigames-20" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_parent">highly recommend it</a>.</div>Chris Farrellhttps://plus.google.com/107526139736953433093noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-914191259119493058.post-76453810517205447052014-03-02T18:34:00.002-08:002014-03-02T18:34:37.977-08:00A Distant Plain<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><i>(I have moved over to WordPress – <a href="http://illuminatinggames.wordpress.com/2014/03/02/a-distant-plain/">check out the new digs</a> if you want to get join the discussion)</i></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Although I&nbsp;<a href="http://illuminatinggames.wordpress.com/2013/03/09/andean-abyss/" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" title="Andean Abyss">wasn’t very impressed by Andean Abyss</a>, I’m still intrigued by the idea of GMT’s COIN game system, so I went up to&nbsp;<a href="http://www.endgameoakland.com/" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">EndGame</a>&nbsp;in Oakland to join in their biweekly(ish) wargaming group to try to give A Distant Plain a fair shot.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">I’d actually played the game once previously in a near-final playtest version, and hadn’t been very impressed. It’s sill unconscionably long when payed to 5 propaganda cards, easily 6+ hours if the game goes the distance (today we played to the 3rd propaganda cards of a 4-card “short” game in 4 hours). The green faction (the Warlords here) is still pretty boring and basically just doing the one or two things that they do and praying nobody notices; however unlike the Cartels in Andean Abyss, the Warlords in A Distant Plain face extremely daunting victory conditions. The pacing is still pretty slow unless players make a conscious effort to move the game quickly. It’s still completely bewildering the first time you try to play it as each faction has its own set of actions available, and there is a proliferation of different levels players are competing on. The Government wants to control population and pad their Swiss bank accounts but doesn’t care whether their citizens are actually happy; the Coalition wants people to support the government at low cost but doesn’t care about military control; the Warlords want to keep the the state destabilized; and the Taliban just wants everyone to be unhappy.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The magic in A Distant Plain is the relationship between the (Afghan Central) Government and the (US-led) Coalition. Broadly speaking, the idea of the game is that there are two fronts in the war: the military battle for control of territory, and the battle for the hearts and minds of the population. The Government’s &nbsp;goal is to physically control territory; they are only interested in hearts and minds to the extent that it allows them to engage in graft without the population immediately going over to the Taliban. The Coalition is interested only in hearts and minds, but you can only win hearts and minds by first militarily controlling territory. The two players don’t trust each other, but do have to share a checkbook and have some joint military command. Only one can win. Cue endless and entertaining bickering. This is the soul of the game and does capture the incredibly fraught relationship between the US and Hamid Karzai.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">By contrast the positions of the Taliban is fine but far less interesting, and probably not going to keep you going for 4+ hours. The Warlords probably only have about 2 hours in them. So play the short game.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The other important thing I think A Distant Plain improves over Andean Abyss is that it amps up the power of the event card deck. In Andean Abyss, players seemed to quickly figure out that most of the events were really hard to justify taking given the opportunity cost (i.e., not moving pieces on the board). More powerful events mean more get used, which means more flavor, more tension, and quicker play – all good. One player felt like it might have gone too far, but I feel that’s unlikely. Whether it’s hit the sweet spot is hard to tell for sure obviously – this is a rather involved game – but it’s clearly closer.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Like Andean Abyss, A Distant Plain is a complete-information whack-the-leader and be-ahead-at-the-end game with simple and open scores. It’s not great, but at least at this point you should know what you’re in for. You need to be able to enjoy the journey here more than the destination.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Also like Andean Abyss, I remain somewhat frustrated by how superficially A Distant Plain treats the subject matter. For example, A Distant Plain portrays the Government as corrupt by making its endgame victory condition goal being corrupt (each time they take a Govern action, they convert support for the government into patronage, and win on a combination of military control and patronage, not support). There is no sense of or examination of&nbsp;<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">why</em>&nbsp;the Government is so corrupt, or the fact that the only way the US or the Afghan Government actually win this thing (or even establish the foundations for legitimate counter-insurgency) is by hacking away at that corruption. As long as that corruption is a fact of the game, the Coalition might as well go home. The &nbsp;government was and is so weak because the real power outside of Kabul resides with warlords, which drives corruption at the center. But in A Distant Plain, the Warlords are just a warmed over version of the Drug Cartels from Andean Abyss. A Distant Plain would have been more interesting and authentic – at least if it’s really attempting to be a game about COIN – if it had not been satisfied with just having a great Coalition-Afghan Government relationship, but had attacked the relationship between the Warlords and the Afghan Government and the Warlords and the Taliban with the same vigor.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">I also have to say I find the area control mechanics of the cubes-and-cylinders game not very evocative of the violence that has wracked Afghanistan. You’ll get some sense of the human cost inflicted on the Taliban as those units routinely get wiped out by Government and Coalition offensives and airstrikes, but the Taliban doesn’t seem to have the incentive or means to inflict damage on Coalition or even Government cubes. “Good guys” going to the casualty box will be a rare occurrence unless the Taliban can snag a good set of capabilities cards, and should not tax your conscience.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">If you’re interested in the topic of counterinsurgency in general and Afghanistan in particular, I recommend Max Boot’s&nbsp;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0871406888/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0871406888&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=illumigames-20" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Invisible Armies</a>, which is a solid survey history of insurgency and counter-insurgency. Also Fred Kaplan’s&nbsp;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1451642652/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1451642652&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=illumigames-20" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Insurgents</a>&nbsp;(not those insurgents) and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470422815/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0470422815&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=illumigames-20" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Daydream Believers</a>, as well as his many columns for&nbsp;<a href="http://www.slate.com/authors.fred_kaplan.html" style="border: 0px; color: #21759b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">War Stories over at Slate</a>, in which he has discussed the surges and the complicated relationships between Washington and Kabul at some length. While I think A Distant Plain does an interesting job of tackling elements of the war, to me it relates the stories of the battles but not the actual fundamentals of counter-insurgency. Perhaps due to the currency and rawness of the topic it couldn’t do any more, but if that’s the case, why make it?</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">I’ve saved the worst for last, mostly because it’s the least interesting, but the design of the action cards which are central (and crucial) to the game is truly awful. The pictures are small and busy and you often have to squint at them to make out what’s going on. The text size is small and low-contrast and hard to read even when you have excellent light and are looking right at it, which of course you almost never are because it’s right across the board. The sandy background further disrupts the already terrible readability. It’s unforgivably bad and is a significant obstacle to enjoying actual face-to-face play (does all playtesting take place over VASSAL these days?). These needed to be either on larger cards with bigger fonts, or the pictures needed to be ditched, or something, because a crucial element of the game is borderline unusable.</div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #3f3f3f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 27px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">So I won’t deny there are a number of things about the game that bug me, some of them pretty significant. I’m trying to decide if the fact that it has one really great thing plus a generally more nuanced and interesting texture than Andean Abyss makes it worth playing. I don’t have a definitive answer, but I do think it has a lot more going for it than the previous game did. Even if it’s not a panacea, the central driver of the US-Afghanistan relationship gives the game a soul that Andean Abyss lacked. The better and more interesting event mix gives the game a bit more energy and motion.&nbsp;<span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">I think if you know what you’re getting into and set expectations appropriately it’s worth a shot, although some experience with the much&nbsp;</span>shorter&nbsp;<span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Cuba Libre will be valuable in making it less</span><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">&nbsp;daunting. Just stick to the short game, and make sure the&nbsp;</span>pace<span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">&nbsp;moves.</span></div>Chris Farrellhttps://plus.google.com/107526139736953433093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-914191259119493058.post-85795655253122069892014-02-27T00:01:00.000-08:002014-02-27T09:02:17.709-08:00Pathfinder Adventure Cardgame<div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">For a guy who ostensibly thinks dungeon-crawling is stupid, I sure have played a lot of games in that genre of late. The latest is <a href="http://paizo.com/pathfinder/adventureCardGame"><span style="color: #042eee; letter-spacing: 0px;">Pathfinder: The Adventure Card Game</span></a>, a cooperative game from Paizo Publishing, and&nbsp;it's not bad.</span></div><div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px; min-height: 18px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The game is a quite faithful port of the Pathfinder/D&amp;D3 roleplaying experience, minus the actual roleplaying (which is traditionally optional anyway). You've got a character with strength, dexterity,&nbsp;wisdom, and so on, each rated as a die size (d4, d6, d8, etc., but ironically not a d20). Encounters (which can be monsters, barriers,&nbsp;allies, treasures) have a target number which you need to beat to successfully navigate. You can play cards from your character's personalized deck and use your inherent special powers to boost your skills, and occasionally your allies can help you. Track down and kill the episode's Villain, usually cutting a swathe through his or her Henchpeople on the way, and you win. After the game, you can rebuild your character's deck using cards you've acquired during the adventure to make him or her more potent next time.</span></div><div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px; min-height: 18px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The mechanics of this are simple and nicely done, but not particularly noteworthy. What I think is interesting is looking at how the game approaches the question of how to balance narrative scripting against gameplay variability.</span></div><div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px; min-height: 18px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Cooperative games usually need to provide some kind of narrative experience to be successful; they can't just be intellectual puzzles. There are obviously a lot of ways to do this, but the general idea is to give the series of challenges the players must overcome (and rewards they receive for doing so) some&nbsp;sort of structure designed to engage them. This can be entirely narrative, with the challenges having some attached title or flavor text which is read aloud with the story becoming emergent&nbsp;as the texts are read (as long as they are coherent enough that players can improvise logical connections). Or the structure can be much more constructed and explicit, with challenges and rewards designed and ordered to produce an intended overall emotional story arc.</span></div><div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px; min-height: 18px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Examples of games which use the first idea are easy to find; successful examples include Robinson Crusoe, Tales of the Arabian Nights, and Ghost Stories (or Arkham Horror, Shadows over Camelot, or Defenders of the Realm, if you consider those games good). You have a huge supply of little&nbsp;storylets, which are pulled out more or less randomly and translated into game-mechanics form. A windstorm hits (reducing your shelter level), your lack of Courtly Graces offends the nobility (and you become Scorned), or&nbsp;whatever. As they are read they form a timeline you can create a story out of.</span></div><div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px; min-height: 18px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This has the gameplay advantage of&nbsp;making the tasks you are facing varied and unpredictable, and differ greatly from game to game. It also allows the players to do their own storytelling when the events remain within the bounds of the somewhat plausible. The huge disadvantage, as anyone who has a basic understanding of literature or music will tell you, is that we have a pretty good understanding of how compelling narratives are built, and this is most definitely not it. Stories have build-up, carefully managed cycles of tension and resolution, anticipation, and suspense. None of which you can&nbsp;reliably do if you’re just pulling random&nbsp;storylets.</span></div><div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px; min-height: 18px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Still, I think there is nothing inherently wrong with this way of doing things. For example, while Nuclear War or Fluxx aren't particular good games by 2014&nbsp;standards, they do have delightful anti-establishment or satirical aesthetics that are both completely coherent and tied up with their total randomness (and, it bears mentioning, their brevity). Or a game like Once Upon a Time, where the players' attempts to create signal out of noise and find ways to creatively link events is what the&nbsp;game is.&nbsp;So clearly it's possible to do great work this way. But it's also an easy and unfortunate default pattern when a designer is unskilled, or when a game doesn't have a strong creative vision or anything particular to say. If you look at a big and intricate game like Battlestar Galactica, where the fictional world it's designed to emulate has a clear authorial style, it's&nbsp;hard to see the merit in having the players interact with a simple, random, unstructured&nbsp;throughline.</span></div><div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px; min-height: 18px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The opposite end of the spectrum is Knizia's highly structured Lord of the Rings. Here, the story events and the challenges associated with them are laid out in a strict order. You're going through Rivendell to Moria to Rohan, and that's all&nbsp;there is to it. You face the same challenges (and narrative elements) in the same order each game. There is this still quite a lot of randomness in the timing of the events and resource flows, as random draws from a bag of tiles trigger various game elements, but the story events that drive the narrative are scripted.</span></div><div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px; min-height: 18px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This strong structure gives the gameplay itself the ebb and flow required to make the story engaging. The designer can directly tweak and manage the flow of challenges and rewards to&nbsp;manipulate the moment-to-moment game tension, hopefully giving us both high-tension action&nbsp;scenes and rewarding us with moments of rest and refresh after we get through. This can, when well executed, give us a far more visceral engagement with the game because it goes after our emotions very directly. Pandemic does the same thing: the structured way the decks are manipulated (pre-stacking the player deck, the stacking and re-stacking of the infection deck) alternates high-risk and&nbsp;high-tension periods where you are firefighting crises with lower-risk infrastructure-building and research-gathering periods.</span></div><div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px; min-height: 18px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Even though for all these reasons I think of the structured narrative as "the right way" and the random event firehose as "the wrong way", in truth it's a continuum and structure is certainly not an end in and of itself. The goal is to modulate the players’ sense or risk, to feed the dread of anticipation and allow the relief and accomplishment of a challenge faced down, and that requires both a degree of predictability as well as significant risk and therefore uncertainty. Clearly you can go too far in trying to organize your narrative –&nbsp;making the story predictable and boring – just as you can make a game too random and disjointed. It wouldn't be hard to argue that Britannia, for example, is too well-organized and that it needs more uncertainty to maintain tension. My experience though is that cooperative or narrative-driven games almost never err on the side of being too structured.</span></div><div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px; min-height: 18px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The interesting thing about Pathfinder is that from the long view it resembles classic, unstructured, firehose-driven games. You have a box containing a very large number of cards that the characters can encounter, and you randomly pull some of them out and deal them into piles at different locations to explore. When you explore, you just draw a card from a location deck and do what it says, with perhaps&nbsp;minor assistance from the other&nbsp;players. The Villain is dealt into one of these piles at random and you just need to plow through the decks to hunt him down. If your goal is hunting the bad guy, there are no percentages in going to the Apothecary&nbsp;before you hit the Treacherous Cave; the Villain is equally likely to be anywhere. It’s eerily similar to Arkham Horror's "go to a location and&nbsp;random stuff happens for no particular reason".</span></div><div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px; min-height: 18px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But Pathfinder combines straightforward gameplay with just enough structure to make decision-making and task allocation interesting and have a real but measured sense of risk. Each location has a clearly specified mix of cards that go into the deck: monsters, barriers, weapons,&nbsp;</span>armor,<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">&nbsp;spells, items, and allies. The mix is listed on the top of the location card, where you can always look at it and know what you’re getting in to. So unlike in Arkham Horror, when you go to a location you have a pretty clear idea of what you might get out of it and which character is best suited for the challenges it might present (the Thief for the location with the barriers, the Fighter for the place with the monsters, the Sorcerer for the place with the allies). Still, while the Fighter may be the best person to take on the monsters in the Desecrated Vault, there is still usually the possibility that he’ll run into a barrier or trap that’ll hose him, so there is almost always still some risk. And there are balancing factors; maybe you really need to find a better a weapon, so a trip to the Garrison is worth the risk of facing monsters. More likely, you don’t have a character who is ideally suited to exploring a location, but someone has to do it, so you need to figure out who is going to sign up for the increased risk (because you always have to face the card you draw, teaming up is actually not particularly useful). Additionally, once locations have been cleared of Henchpeople, they need to be “closed”, secured against the Villain’s return. This involves another test, and the character best suited to exploring the location may well not be ideally suited to closing it. Opportunities to close a location are infrequent and valuable and you want someone who is able to do it there when the opportunity presents itself, which is another matter of risk management. This all adds up to a significant amount of nuance and randomness, but because the general contours are spelled out and what needs to be done is clear, it’s interestingly tractable. You always know what you need to do to make forward progress, and you can make judgements about risk and reward that can pay off or not.</span></div><div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px; min-height: 18px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">However, what this structure doesn’t do is give you any overall sense of pacing or drive. Some locations are more dangerous than others (sometimes significantly so, often not), but the game never modulates its moment-to-moment tension. You’re never forced to run the gauntlet before you want to or go into panic defense mode, nor are you given a moment of respite to recover and gear up after facing something particularly dangerous. Pathfinder's time pressure is just a 30-turn clock you need to beat – an arbitrary, inorganic limit. Compare to Pandemic, with its beautifully organic ebbing and flowing threat and pressure, where you need to win before the diseases do. By comparison, Pathfinder just has a time limit because if it didn’t there would be no game. Given Pathfinder’s source material this is fine, time just isn’t a dimension of traditional D&amp;D stories; for structural reasons D&amp;D-style RPGs in general have a difficult time managing time as a storytelling pressure. But this is a boardgame, not an RPG, and there is no need to be bound by a stricture of the original format.</span></div><div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px; min-height: 18px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Interestingly for a game that lacks any kind of strong overarching narrative, Pathfinder eschews any sort of explicit textual elements. Cards have illustrations and more or less descriptive titles but no flavor text. There are no “event” cards which add dramatic twists or change the rules or environment. The only real explanation of what you’re trying to accomplish comes up front, when you select the adventure to go on and get a few perfunctory sentences of flavor on the card that also outlines the locations, Villains, and Henchpeople involved (location cards also have some static descriptions, but they are in practice invisible because they're on the back of the card). This makes the experience somewhat generic. The box says it’s the “Rise of the Runelords Base Set”, with the “Rise of the Runelords” being the long-form adventure arc which wends its way through the base game and 5 expansions. But there is no sense that this is taking place in anything other than just a generic D&amp;D fantasy world. If the premise of the story is that there are Runelords and they are rising, the game doesn’t exactly go out of its way to fill you in on what’s up with that.</span></div><div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px; min-height: 18px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What this long arc does capture, though, is very distinctively D&amp;D: the slow, grinding out of improvements to your character and his or her equipment. You wade through monsters and challenges and maybe you’ll find a longsword to replace your short sword. The upgrades to your character and availability of new cards to add your deck are sporadic; after four games, you may have a better weapon or one more spell, or you may have basically the same deck you started with and one minor skill improvement. After you make it all the way through all the adventures your character will have accomplished quite a bit in the end, but that will be a lot of hours of gaming and the rewards for risking death each time out are very incremental. That’s fine, it’s the D&amp;D tradition, but in the context of a boardgame it feels wrong. If this is the route we’re going to go, I’d like more intense pacing. Personally, I’d much rather have multiple, complete 6-episode arcs which have a quick pace and you can play a character through and then move on to the next story with a fresh character. The 36-episode monster arc just seems like a huge time sink. This feels to me like a back-port from MMORPGs, and not really appropriate for a boardgames.</span></div><div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px; min-height: 18px;"><br /></div><br /><div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Still, when all is taken into account I do like Pathfinder: The Adventure Card Game: Rise of the Runelords well enough. The pacing of the long adventure arc is probably too slack to keep me interested for that long, but the individual adventures are playable, quick, simple, and are structured well enough to provide both meaningful decisions and some tension. It’s certainly not in the same league as Robinson Crusoe, Pandemic, or Lord of the Rings, but you can’t play those games <i>all</i> the time and some of them require a significant energy investment while Pathfinder is more lightweight. Besides, D&amp;D is more than a game now, it’s become something of a cultural touchstone. While the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game may not exactly be a work of game design brilliance, it is a workmanlike game that has a huge weight of tradition behind it.</span></div>Chris Farrellhttps://plus.google.com/107526139736953433093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-914191259119493058.post-25763062881460014422014-02-04T23:36:00.001-08:002014-02-04T23:42:59.596-08:0013th Age<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I've been fed up with D&amp;D and its many incarnations (basically D&amp;D 2, 3, 3.5,&nbsp;and 4, Pathfinder, and other d20 knock-offs) for some time now. The picayune rules complexity is painful and unwelcome; the generic European medieval fantasy gameworld is bland and uninspiring; its core activity of killing things and taking their&nbsp;stuff is vaguely unsettling; and the constant repetition of the same storytelling tropes has become tiresome. With small-press and indie RPG publishers doing so many interesting things, it's time to move on.&nbsp;My tastes now run much more towards a game like <a href="http://www.rpggeek.com/rpg/1670/arcana-evolved"><span style="color: #042eee; letter-spacing: 0px;">Arcana Evolved</span></a>, a game based on the D&amp;D 3.5 rules but one where Monte Cooke's&nbsp;wonderfully imaginative and well-realized world, driven by a distinctive&nbsp;creative vision, justified the complexity. Or Robin Law's <a href="http://www.pelgranepress.com/?cat=66"><span style="color: #042eee; letter-spacing: 0px;">Ashen Stars</span></a>,&nbsp;which uses a simple, highly&nbsp;playable and player-driven game system in a terrifically-realized setting. Nonetheless, I was optimistic about <a href="http://www.pelgranepress.com/?cat=248"><span style="color: #042eee; letter-spacing: 0px;">13th Age</span></a>. The promise of a streamlined game system and higher expectations for player&nbsp;engagement appealed to me, but a d20 game based in a traditional D&amp;D-ish fantasy world makes finding players much easier. Here was the possibility of happy compromise.</span></span><br /><div style="min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If you’ve played D&amp;D4, the rules transition to playing 13th Age is relatively painless (and only somewhat less so, although perhaps a little more fraught, if you’re coming from D&amp;D3 or Pathfinder). Your character sheet will look much simpler, but entirely familiar. You roll d20s for checks. At-Will/Encounter/Daily powers define your character. Healing surges, saving throws, and attacks and defenses are all still there. Combat no longer uses a map grid, but otherwise has a similar feel. D&amp;D4 may have had a variety of issues, but it did good work in terms of filing off needless rules<i>&nbsp;</i>complexity and making D&amp;D a more playable game and less about searching for rules exploits. 13th Age pushes even further in this direction.</span></span><br /><div style="min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Although 13th Age races and classes are defined similarly to D&amp;D4, they are clearly homages to incarnations past. They’re all here: Fighters, Wizards, Clerics, Rogues, Bards, and so on.&nbsp;Barbarians are simple to play, have only a few powers to activate even as they go up levels, and just wade into melee and kick ass and take names. Fighters are more sophisticated and have a variety of combat&nbsp;maneuvers that can trigger on every die roll. Rogues and Wizards reclaim their place as the most intricate classes,&nbsp;requiring both the management of lots of abilities and the creative use of strong but situational powers. Notably, Paladins are both playable and interesting, a first for a fantasy d20 game I believe (I can’t personally speak to Bards). Initially I was pleased to see D&amp;D4's movement towards balanced classes, but I soon realized the fix (giving everything a high degree of symmetry) was as bad as the original problem (the classes no longer felt distinctive). 13th Age gets this right.</span></span><br /><div style="min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">So far, this “just” adds up to a more skillfully executed version of D&amp;D. 13th Age brings 3 key new ideas: character backgrounds, icons relationships, and one unique things&nbsp;&nbsp;(there are some other ideas, including a magic item system&nbsp;</span>that promises more than it delivers, but these are the big ones<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">). Some aspects work better than others, and they all highlight both the potential and the pitfalls of the game.</span></span><br /><div style="min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Backgrounds replace D&amp;D skills. Concrete skills (run, jump, diplomacy, etc.) are gone. Instead, you write backgrounds for your character, which can range from the straightforward to the esoteric: "temple guard", "reformed&nbsp;thief", and "hellhole commando" are some examples from the book. My last character, a dark elf paladin, had "Emissary of the Court of the Stars" and "The Queen's Executioner". If you need to make a skill check, just see if one of your backgrounds applies and use it as a bonus. This is terrific and gives you a lot of interesting leeway to both bring your character to life in a mechanically useful way, and add your creative voice to the setting (who knew the Elf Queen used elite assassins?). More games should do this.</span></span><br /><div style="min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Replacing the bizarre pantheon of D&amp;D deities, 13 Age gives us 13 Icons –&nbsp;the mortal but incredibly powerful movers and shakers of the 13th Age world. Some of these are cool and add depth to the setting: The Archmage, The Crusader, The Great Gold Wyrm, and The Three. Some of them are startlingly generic: just the names of The Dwarf King, The Elf Queen, The High Druid, and The Orc Lord tell you most of what there is. All characters start with relationships with a couple of them, either positive, negative, or ambiguous. You roll a die for each of your relationship points at the start of a session, and 5s and 6s create “story hooks” which bring that relationship into that evening’s play. I like this is theory, but unless you’re playing in an extremely improvisational style, in practice it is at best a bit awkward. The throughline of 13th Age is still largely about killing things and taking their stuff, so GMs are going to spec out combat scenes (much easier than any version of D&amp;D, but still some work) and work out the general adventure flow, so these relationship rolls serve mainly to provide riffing possibilities or flavor. Which is OK but not spectacularly interesting, and they also have a big risk: they can significantly damage party cohesion. If one player has picked the Crusader and the GM uses one of her relationship rolls as the hook for the adventure, how does she convince another player whose relationships are with the Elf Queen and the High Druid to come along? These icons have rather different agendas. 13th Age provides no inherent glue to keep parties with relationships to different Icons from coming apart. The first thing you need to figure out as a GM is how you keep your players together and focussed. These relationship rolls are sufficiently awkward that I suspect many GMs will end up looking at their players’ icon relationships and just regard them as story requests, and ignore the die-roll mechanics associated with them.</span></span><br /><div style="min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Lastly, the One Unique Thing is the simplest but also the most interesting aspect of your character. Usually just one short sentence, it describes what makes your character different from everyone else. The rules and examples give you significant leeway in interpreting just what “unique” means; you can go with “unique in the party” or “unique in the entire game world”. Some of the examples from the book are pretty mundane (“I am a former cultist”? Really?), and my preference is to be aggressive about making your uniques interesting and truly unique (my paladin’s was “I am the only elf who can withdraw from the mystical Elven dream consciousness”). Low-level D&amp;D characters have always had the problem that they are generally incompetent and unremarkable stereotypes. Giving them a unique thing means everyone has a sense of destiny, even at low level (never fear, your one unique thing doesn’t have to be an accident of birth or ancestry, it could also be something earned or experienced prior to the start of play). One way to think about a unique thing is that it can be intriguing but non-specific –&nbsp;perhaps a question you don’t know the answer to that the GM can use as a hook to play off. But, it doesn’t have to say anything about the future; it could be something memorable that you did in the past that can give your character depth. To me, the best ones are the ones that say something about both your character and the world. The game&nbsp;</span>itself<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">&nbsp;doesn’t give what I would consider firm guidance on this though, it gives you a few soft suggestions and lets you figure out how you want to use them.</span></span><br /><div style="min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This I think is an example of where 13th Age, for all its many virtues, falls short because it hedges. It doesn’t have its own&nbsp; premise, its own reason for existence, or if it does it doesn’t go all in. If you pick up <a href="http://www.numenera.com/"><span style="color: #042eee; letter-spacing: 0px;">Numenéra</span></a> or <a href="http://rpggeek.com/rpg/11202/nights-black-agents"><span style="color: #042eee; letter-spacing: 0px;">Night’s Black Agents</span></a>, those games are in no doubt about what they are trying to do creatively, and deliver what they promise. 13th Age is instead relying on you to tap into your long history of playing D&amp;D and D&amp;D-like games to bring along the elements of D&amp;D that you like and meld them with the ideas in 13th Age. In terms of tapping into the largest available market of gamers, this is obviously great. In terms of presenting a game with a clear creative vision of its own that might compel you to play it, not so much. This wishy-washiness of how to play the game’s simplest, most important core idea – the uniques –&nbsp;is one way this plays out, but there are other important ways too. The gazetteer of the world is less than 20 pages long (counting art) and consists mostly of tropes and vague descriptions, and is too high level to be of much use once you get down to brass tacks and try to set actual adventures in actual locations. Only a few of the Icons have more than a column of useful text attached to them, while many –&nbsp;The Elf Queen, The Dwarf King –&nbsp;have perhaps two meaningful sentences of description, far too little for them to be useful as anything more than an access point to your repository of bad fantasy tropes regarding Elven Queens or Dwarven Kings (dwarves never being rules by queens, and elves only rarely by kings).</span></span><br /><div style="min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That might be fine, but let’s be honest here, these tropes are boring, predictable, and generally suck. It’s not enough to just do D&amp;D with a better rules set that is more about creative play and less about creative rules exploits. I want to care about the world I’m playing in, to be part of the group not just because they needed a cleric and my character was available at the time.</span></span><br /><div style="min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">So I find myself conflicted about 13th Age. The game design is great and is mechanically by far my favorite in the “kill monsters and take their stuff” genre. Not a&nbsp;</span>high bar admittedly, but still!<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">&nbsp;I love the backgrounds and the One Unique Things. I am less enamored of the fact that the gamemaster has to do so much heavy lifting to make the game work: flesh out the details of all the lightly-detailed icons and figure out what they are up to in her world; fill out the too-sparse bestiary; figure out some way to make sure the party is coherent; not just police the inevitable “awesome at everything” backgrounds and “I’m the only person who can fire at-will 10d6 fireballs from my eyes” uniques, but fill in all the guidance that the book lacks on how to corral players and the GM into a coherent campaign style that will produce interesting and useful uniques. Giving players freedom is great, but in order to be productive, that freedom requires constraints. Specifically, it requires the constraints of a setting. 13th Age seems to want to have its cake and eat it too. It wants to be innovative and give players agency and all that, but it doesn’t want to scare off D&amp;D and Pathfinder players by putting a stake in the ground. So it waffles. There is nothing more deadly to a creative enterprise than waffling.</span></span><br /><div style="min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">For a sense of comparison, I’ve run both 13th Age and Ashen Stars recently. By virtue of Ashen Stars’ clear premise, strong setting, and clean system, I was able to put together my first story arc and successfully run it with less than an hour of prep time</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">. By contrast, prepping an adventure for 13th Age was a time sink because so much world creation still needs to be done –&nbsp;fleshing out and determining the motives of the icons, figuring out their organizations, building cities, working with players’ varying and sometimes conflicting uniques, and so on. Because 13th Age lacks a Premise, the resulting chaos demands to be sorted.</span></span><br /><div style="min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I have&nbsp;</span>nonetheless<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">&nbsp;enjoyed playing 13th Age as a mild rebuke to the overwrought D&amp;D tradition. The game system is elegant and does reward player creativity. It's easy to get into and lively. But for me, the bad fantasy genre of D&amp;D-style roleplaying that 13th Age is channeling is not really in my blood, so 13th Age needed to do more than just show up and look cool to win me over. It fills a niche, and it’s a game I’ll probably enjoy playing from time to time, but for where I am in my roleplaying career it’s still not the answer.&nbsp;</span></span>Chris Farrellhttps://plus.google.com/107526139736953433093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-914191259119493058.post-1019187266057565632014-01-30T11:03:00.000-08:002014-01-30T11:03:47.982-08:00LOKA<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I have never cared much for Chess, but I've always been intrigued by various chess variants. One of the most interesting was <a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/38764/shuuro">Shuuro</a>, designed by Alesso Cavatore (who I knew through the <a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/28805/the-lord-of-the-rings-strategy-battle-game">Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game</a>, which I enjoyed until&nbsp;RSI sunk that hobby for me). Shurro is&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Chess</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;played&nbsp;on a large, 12x12 board with armies you design yourself using a point-buy system. I found it&nbsp;intriguing because the large number of pieces and large amount of space involved tended to move the game more in the&nbsp;direction of a strategic, creative game than a purely tactical one – at least, when played by players of comparatively low pure chess skill.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The drawback of Shuuro (and its companion 4-player expansion <a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgameexpansion/86877/turanga">Turanga</a>) was that it ultimately didn't quite move the ball far enough away from the Chess aesthetic to rope in players like me. It's still a pretty ruthlessly analytical look-ahead game where seemingly minor overlooked branches in the search&nbsp;tree can have catastrophic results. Also, with more pieces and more space it can take a while to play. Even so, Shuuro is one of the few no-luck pure abstracts that I like, although I would still generally play any of the GIPF series games by preference.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-aXEoZZawW2w/UuqgmoZAqrI/AAAAAAAAArk/VlW9ZydozHE/s1600/IMG_1913.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-aXEoZZawW2w/UuqgmoZAqrI/AAAAAAAAArk/VlW9ZydozHE/s1600/IMG_1913.jpg" height="320" width="262" /></a><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Enter <a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/138799/loka-a-game-of-elemental-strategy">LOKA</a>, the next logical step along this path of making Chess for people who don't like Chess. Again, we're playing with regular&nbsp;chess pieces on a regular square grid, but LOKA embraces Turanga's 4-player, 2-team game as the standard mode of play, with teams starting on opposite sides and needing to&nbsp;capture&nbsp;the kings of both opponents to win. Again, you're buying your pieces using points, and you can adjust the feel and intensity of your games by choosing how many points players get.* You put out a few random terrain pieces to mix things up a little bit. And, did I mention, you use dice to resolve capture attempts.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When you try to capture an opponent's piece, both players roll a die. You start with a d4 and get "boosts" to larger die sizes (d4 -&gt; d8 -&gt; d12 -&gt; d20) based on the situation: being the attacker, being a better piece, or (most crucially) having other attacking pieces threatening the target piece, or other defending pieces&nbsp;covering it. Also crucially, these additional threats or defenders can be either yours or your partner's. High die roller wins, capturing the opponent's piece. In case of ties defender wins, unless it was double 1's, in which case both pieces are removed.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">From these simple and elegant ideas, a&nbsp;fascinating game that completely upends&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Chess</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;emerges. No longer is the primary heavy lifting of deciding on a move done through lengthy analysis of move and counter-move. Instead, a big factor becomes judgements about risk and at how far to push your luck. Because capturing is not a sure thing anymore, decisive threats take a little bit longer to develop as you and your partner need to coordinate to build it up. As a consequence, you find yourself asking: do I like the odds of that capture attempt? Is now the&nbsp;time to do it? Do I need to martial more forces? Similarly for the defender, you ask: am I better off reinforcing this piece, getting out of the way, or standing fast and developing my own threat elsewhere? What is my tolerance for risk?</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The&nbsp;probabilities involved here are interesting. Even the&nbsp;most extreme cases (d20 attacking d4, d6 attacking d20) have a roughly 12% chance of backfiring/breaking your way. In practice, setting up monster d20 attacks is extremely difficult, so you're looking at the&nbsp;middle of the range, d8s and d12s vs. d6s or d8s for developed attacks.&nbsp;You need to decide whether the risks are worth the rewards, and those risks cannot be shrugged off. You need to set up good risks (either&nbsp;favorable attacks in terms of piece exchange or position, or attacks where you risk a lot less of either than your opponent does) and avoid bad ones. Taking a pawn just because you can is all of a sudden unappealing; that 10-20% or more&nbsp;downside risk of any capture attempt means if you're going to roll the dice, you have to have significant upside. You need to focus on things of immediate value, not things 6 moves downstream which have no chance to play out.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-spfve9pcXH4/Uuqgm7vndVI/AAAAAAAAAro/ipBME4ijg00/s1600/IMG_1914.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-spfve9pcXH4/Uuqgm7vndVI/AAAAAAAAAro/ipBME4ijg00/s1600/IMG_1914.jpg" height="320" width="257" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If that were it, it still might not be enough (the game includes rules and a board for playing 2-player, but I&nbsp;haven't tried it and don't&nbsp;have much desire to). Capture probabilities would be just something else to factor into your position analysis. What makes LOKA sing for me is combining this with&nbsp;the fact that LOKA is a team game. Because now your partner can very directly provide support to your attacks and defenses, you get a very interesting game of tempo and coordination (much moreso than Turanga, which was closer to straight Chess). You can move to support your partners' threats, or assist in defense to allow her to continue to press an advantage. You'll generally want to try to bring you and your partner's combined&nbsp;weight against one opponent while holding off the other. So it becomes a question of tempo. In theory, you and your partner can get two moves for every one of a single opponent. Obviously, your opponents will be&nbsp;trying to do the same thing to you, so the extent to which you can work together to achieve advantage is crucial. As in Ingenious (Einfach Genial), in-game communication is illegal so you have to do your best to understand and anticipate, to try to&nbsp;signal without sacrificing advantage –&nbsp;all while trying to keep your options open so you can shift one way or the other to take advantage of opportunity.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I found all these interplays totally fascinating, so I really enjoyed LOKA. It helps that Mantic has done a great job with the presentation of the game, colorful and with nice models for the various pieces that are both flavorful and&nbsp;readily identifiable&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">as their corresponding&nbsp;chess pieces,&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">once you understand the design.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One key to LOKA, as in so many games, is that it has to be played in a reasonable amount of time – or at least, an amount of time everyone at the table is comfortable with. Probabilities in LOKA are fairly coarse – most attacks will&nbsp;have chances of success between 60% and 80% in increments of 10% or 15% – so it is obviously a game with significant luck. LOKA is certainly part tactical game and you need to do Chess-like lookahead, but the probabilities make deep analysis unrewarding. It's a game about managing fairly clear risks and threats. However, the game does look a lot like Chess – it's Chess pieces and a chess board, despite the nice fantasy design – and so it's easy to default to traditional Chess deep tree analysis. But, with a sparse board in the 160 point game and threats from your neighbors developing diagonally, you do need to be careful of long-ranging bishops which can surprise you if your Chess experience has you focusing on the center of the board. So, while you do need&nbsp;to break some Chess habits, there is still analysis to be done. It's a tricky balance to strike when figuring out how to best use your time. It's also of course a 4-player game, so downtime can factor in. In&nbsp;general, my feeling is that while a considered pace is fine, it does need to keep moving. I'm not generally a fan of timers in games, but this might be the exception to ensure a play time everyone is comfortable with (and there are some nice ones now like the <a href="http://www.coolstuffinc.com/p/136580">DGT Pyramid Game Timer</a> – the colors even match). For me, a little time management pressure heightens the excitement and keeps the game moving. Not everyone&nbsp;will agree.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If you have even just a passing dislike for Chess, check out LOKA. The degree to which it's built a game almost completely unlike Chess on top of Chess' basic mechanics is worth seeing in and of itself. As a game of tactics, risk, and teamwork it's unusual, unexpected, and quite engrossing. It's one of my favorites from 2013.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">---</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* Well, sort of. The base box easily supports 160 points or so,&nbsp;with a few choices about army composition (primarily, to buy a queen or not). If you want to field larger forces, you'll probably need to buy the expansion boxes. The 160 point game is great on its own, it has a spare elegance and plays quickly, but if do enjoy the game&nbsp;you'll almost certainly want to try larger games (you can play 250 points with the base set, but it involves just using all the pieces). I do wish a few more pieces had been included in the base set.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Postscript:&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As a fan of Shuuro and&nbsp;Alesso Cavatore, I backed LOKA on Kickstarter so I got some extra goodies. These worked out nicely in that they add some variety to the game but are more quirky than than really useful additions. The new terrain tiles take the game in a direction I'm not sure it really wants to go (a theme is terrain where pieces can take a chance to power up instead of moving). The new models are cool but the point costs are high&nbsp;and how do you decide who gets to use them? The action card decks are fun (and somewhat different for each faction) but add even more chaos and uncertainty to the game, which I'm not sure is what it really wants. Anyway, these are fun add-ons for backers&nbsp;but not in any way essential</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;or even&nbsp;desirable additions to the game's overall creative vision.</span>Chris Farrellhttps://plus.google.com/107526139736953433093noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-914191259119493058.post-41362184938845793012013-12-18T09:23:00.000-08:002013-12-18T09:23:22.630-08:00Lost Legends<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Reactions to Lost Legends, Mike Elliot's latest attempt to repurpose an existing game (7 Wonders) as a dungeon-crawler, have been all over the map around here. One player thought it was the greatest game ever. Another called it broken. I think it's clearly neither of those things, but where it lies on the spectrum isn't immediately obvious. Like many of Elliot's games, it's conceptually&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">terrific</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;but can also feel&nbsp;precarious at times. Regardless, I quite like it.</span><br /><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Lost Legends is doing for 7 Wonders exactly the same thing that Thunderstone did for Dominion, bringing an abstract game to life by simultaneously melding it with D&amp;D dungeon-crawling tropes and giving the gameplay more subtlety. 7 Wonders is a game I enjoyed for being good for large numbers of players and playing quickly and smoothly, before its obvious problems ran it down: too much front-loading and railroading, a needlessly complex proliferation of scoring&nbsp;mechanisms, and too little opportunity for players to play creatively or do interesting things. And despite all the nice art, it's really just a color-matching game without much, if anything, to say.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">By contrast, Lost Legends is an actual game design and not just a well-engineered&nbsp;arrangement&nbsp;of clever mechanical bits.</span><br /><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As everyone who has had even a passing encounter with D&amp;D knows, if you're going to go into a dungeon and kill creatures and take their stuff, you need the right gear. Your trusty sword and shield and and the&nbsp;righteousness of your cause are not going to cut it. You need healing potions, the latest and greatest&nbsp;magical weaponry,&nbsp;magic armor, a cold iron sword if you think you might run into demons, some&nbsp;holy water and a flask or two of oil to throw at&nbsp;things, a wand of fireballs, a 10 foot&nbsp;pole, and so on (D&amp;D is a game that is in no small part about shopping). After preparing yourself for contingencies ranging from the&nbsp;plausible to the&nbsp;outlandish, depending on your budget and&nbsp;sense of paranoia, you brave the dungeon and see what's actually down there and whether or not you can kill it to raise the cash to continue to feed the shopping frenzy.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Lost Legends nicely captures this American spirit of&nbsp;toolsy&nbsp;acquisitiveness. Your character is going to need equipment to succeed in the dungeon, but you only have so much cash, and there are a lot of things to be bought. Weapons come in three flavors (melee, ranged, and magic), and many monsters are resistant to one or more of them. Your character is also fragile, so you'll want some armor and healing. Or maybe you'd prefer to go a more all-out&nbsp;offense route,&nbsp;amassing&nbsp; powerful spells and a big weapon to knock out your adversaries before they have a chance to strike you and hope you don't run into anything that your spells can't handle. The key, as is so often the case in good games of this sort, is in balance and managing risk. If you're going to skimp on defense, you want to make sure your offense is really strong&nbsp;and robust&nbsp;against a variety of creatures. Stronger defense lowers your risk of getting killed, but at the end of the day the game is about killing monsters and taking their stuff, not staying alive (as in D&amp;D, "dead" is a condition that is just slightly more costly to remove than "severely wounded").</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Having the right tools is the most important thing, but having skills does help also. Each character starts with&nbsp;two&nbsp;different skills, which make matching weapons more effective and give discounts against matching classes of cards. The dwarf will both pay less for the longsword, and be able to do more damage with it. However, additional skills can be fairly easily acquired, and these initial paths serve&nbsp;more as suggestions than strong strategic biases. Lost Legends finds a nice spot here too, with player positions being initially differentiated &nbsp;enough to give everyone an initial shove in a different direction, but not so much that players are just&nbsp;pursuing their own unique path.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Once you've geared up and are ready to start killing monsters, we head to the dungeon. Mechanically, the process of killing monsters and scoring points for them is a bit creakier&nbsp;than the elegant and&nbsp;powerful drafting game. Players are dealt monsters from a deck which they have to individually fight, but if members of&nbsp;the party (i.e., other players) are unengaged because they have vanquished their opponents you can pass your monsters off to them, primarily if you can't handle their resistances or the damage they deal. Monsters come in four different classes (dragons, undead, animals, and humanoids) and you get points for getting 2 or 3 of a kind or one of each, plus&nbsp;another bonus for getting the most of a given kind. You also get&nbsp;experience points for killing anything, which will both improve your&nbsp;character stats (health and mana pool) and ultimately give you points if you get enough of them. There are rules for how you get new&nbsp;monsters, monsters that charge, passing monsters, trophies, and so on, that aren't complicated but are also not intuitive.&nbsp;They get the job done – they give you some control over which monsters you face while often forcing you to deal with whatever you get, add some risk to drawing blind, and make the choices about equipment pay off – but it's hard not to believe they&nbsp;couldn't have been done more cleanly.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Still, the combat does&nbsp;work in two key ways. Firstly, of course, it justifies all the drafting you just did. Choices about specialization vs. flexibility and power vs. defense will pay off (or not). The tactical game of when to deploy the single-use items in your arsenal is not deep, but there is enough there to engage. Secondly, Lost Legends has wisely discarded the tropes of D&amp;D adventuring. In both classic and modern D&amp;D, you have lots of combat designed to wear the party down rather than be an actual threat to their imaginary lives. Lost Legends gives you actual dangerous adversaries. Unwise drafting will, in fact, get you killed. Since Lost Legends is – as it&nbsp;should be – a game of risk, e</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">ven good drafting will occasionally get you killed – as it should. Getting killed is not the end of the world, but is definitely an inconvenience and while you can still do well, it'll be very hard to come back to actually win unless it was a TPK (rare, but not impossible) or you got killed on the way out the door. In line with this, the game is only about an hour.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I liked Lost Legends. It has real stakes – draft well and you'll win, draft poorly and your character&nbsp;will get killed. It has a sense of risk – you do the best you can during drafting, but dungeon delving has occupational hazards and you can't mitigate them all. It separates the winners from the losers – while 7 Wonders will see scores separated by a point or two, Lost Legends spreads of 50-75% are not uncommon, and while sometimes this will be genuinely bad luck, usually it's much more about risks taken and gone bad or failing to&nbsp;achieve a good balance with your character's equipment. It gives you lots of interesting choices and the&nbsp;opportunity to try creative equipment mixes. Lost Legends certainly won't be for everyone, but if you have even a passing desire to kill some monsters and take their stuff, or wanted to like 7 Wonders but wished it had been better, you&nbsp;should&nbsp;check it out.</span></div>Chris Farrellhttps://plus.google.com/107526139736953433093noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-914191259119493058.post-8816627998422915912013-10-31T21:50:00.001-07:002013-10-31T23:16:19.012-07:00Tzolk'in<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I've been wanting to write something about Tzolk'in for quite some time. It's a game I had to be convinced to even try – my&nbsp;experience with CGE has been mixed, and the gears struck me as a gimmick. When I finally got around to trying it though, I liked it a lot and it's almost cracked 10 plays.</span><br /><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br /><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I've still been a bit conflicted, because&nbsp;the game has always seemed a bit&nbsp;vacuous. &nbsp;These days I tend to prefer games with thematic focus.</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;Tzolk'in's physical&nbsp;presentation is very cool, and both the art and the gears use&nbsp;authentic Mayan&nbsp;imagery. Somebody obviously did some research. It's just not clear whether this is all just flash, or if it informs the actual game systems in any way.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The subtitle of the game is "The Mayan Calendar", and Tzolk'in appropriately does seem to revolve around time and tempo. The goal is&nbsp;to score lots of points, which you do by gaining the favor of the gods, installing crystal skulls in Chichen Itza, and building buildings. The resources you'll use to do these things are wood, stone, gold, and food. Acquiring those resources and then turning them into points involves making efficient use of your workers, who you will commit to various tasks for various lengths of time.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Tzolk'in looks a bit like a worker-placement game, because there are workers and you place them. But it's not, at least not in the&nbsp;traditional sense. Here, you have 5 different cities you can assign workers to, each of which specializes in a different task (Palenque does farming, Yaxchiclan resource gathering, Tikal building &amp; technology, Uxmal trading, and Chichen Itza crystal&nbsp;skull mounting). Each turn you must&nbsp;either place one or more workers onto the cities' starting spots on the moving gears, or remove one or more workers and do the action for the space they&nbsp;have advanced to. After everyone has taken a turn the big&nbsp;central gear rotates, driving all the other city gears and advancing all the workers on them by one spot. Crucially, you can't pass. If all your workers are on the board, you have to activate one or more of&nbsp;them. If none of your workers are on the board, you have to place one or more. Placing more than one worker has an increasing cost in food, the currency of the game. You can never be blocked from placing a worker&nbsp;in a city, but if someone else is already there you have to pay more food to get in (although you'll start on an already-advanced spot).</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, it's a game about timing. At some of the cities (resources, food, and skull-mounting), staying on the track longer is usually better, so you'd prefer to keep your worker riding for as long as possible. There are enough exceptions to the general rule that it's not really a rule – for example, some spaces are forests that need to be cleared (for wood) before they&nbsp;can be farmed (for food), and some technology makes early spaces very efficient – but it holds generally. Other tracks are not as straightforward. On the building &amp;&nbsp;technology track, you might want either building, or technology, and those spaces are&nbsp;disjoint and spread out across the dial. The trade track is a true grab brag, with a focus on the third spot which gives you another worker. It all rewards planning. When you jump on a track, you'll want to know what you plan to get out of it (say, you need at least 4 corn, or the space with two technology advances). But you also want to be able to be flexible, letting a worker ride if an opportunity arises. Fortunately, you can always take an action you've already passed by (for a cost in food), so it doesn't always require extreme precision.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Less obviously from this description, but more crucial in practice, is that the requirement to always either place or activate a worker makes&nbsp;it important to find a rhythm. Most of the time you want as many of your workers as possible riding the gears, moving towards better action spots. Maybe you'll want one or two workers on long-term tasks, while the rest cycle on and off of shorter-duration ones. As long as you can keep productively placing and removing workers a few at a time, your&nbsp;costs stay low and you're getting a good number of advances every time the gears rotate. As soon as you have to activate or place larger numbers of workers, you&nbsp;take a hit: 4 workers are extremely expensive to place all in one go, and even 3&nbsp;aren't cheap, but workers off the board aren't working. You want to maximize the amount&nbsp;of time your workers are being productive. My first few games I won comfortably by simply focusing on efficiently keeping my workers working cheaply and not worrying too much about where the points were ultimately going to come from.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Tzolk'in is a no-randomness, 100% open-information game and this juggling act is obviously a bit&nbsp;complicated. &nbsp;Also, it's a CGE game, so the rules are somewhat involved – lots of different action spaces, different buildings, technology advantages, temple tracks with different payoffs, and so on. You could easily imagine this bogging down into total analysis paralysis as Dungeon Lords or Shipyard so easily can. But while it's unquestionably a detailed and thinky game, the gears don't seem to lock up, or at least not as much as you might guess. I think it's because you operate with a lot of constraints – you'll never have enough workers or enough food to do what you really want to do.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If you're short food, which you often will be, there is nothing for it but to go to Palenque.</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;With only 5 spots to put workers, the game focusses on giving you a limited number of highly distinct, high-leverage actions and there is very little of the micromanagement that so often weighs games down.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The&nbsp;big scoring opportunities in the game come from 3 major sources: Monuments you can build, which provide familiar endgame bonuses for having done a range of things during the game (advanced tech tracks, built specific kinds of buildings, farmed, and so on);&nbsp;getting Crystal Skulls and placing them in Chichen Itza; advancing in the&nbsp;temples; and to lesser extent, building buildings. Temple advancement is&nbsp;fairly diffuse and there are opportunities to do&nbsp;this, usually at the cost of resources, on all three of the non-resource-gathering gears. Advances on the temple&nbsp;tracks also feed back and&nbsp;give you resource bonuses twice a game. Crystal Skulls are the most focussed: there is exactly one spot on the resource gear that gives you a Skull and only a Skull, and these are&nbsp;useful only for mounting in Chichen Itza, which gives you points and a bump in one of the temples (and Chichen Itza does nothing else). The rest of the resources are quite flexible, being used for buildings, monuments, buying technology (which makes action spaces more productive), sacrificing to the gods, and selling for food. The net effect feels&nbsp;fairly well-balanced. There aren't any strategic cul-de-sacs, it's easy to feel like you're making progress, and scores will tend to be close. Unlike a lot of 100% open-information, no-luck games, this is not a game designed to make you feel like an idiot.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Even though Tzolk'in plays smoothly and feels pretty elegant once you get into the groove, there are still a fair number of details here and it's moderately tedious to have to explain the game to new players (I haven't even mentioned a fair amount of detail). So the question inevitably arises: what is it all in service of? That's the question that nags at me.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I think the answer is, it's in service of itself. Tzolk'in is thematic in the same way that Ra is thematic. Ra is an auction game with nice art and nods to the familiar Egyptian tropes: floods, pyramids, gods with funny heads, and so on. Tzolk'in is a game about scheduling and timing with nice art and nods to less-familiar Mayan tropes: calendars, corn, step pyramids, even their (as&nbsp;postulated&nbsp;by Jared Diamond) deforestation problem. Does Tzolk'in grab on to anything fundamental about Mayans, their calendar, or their civilization? Not really, and I guess my instinct is that for a game of its complexity, it should.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ultimately I think my instincts are wrong in this case, though. Tzolk'in is a very playable, engaging, meaty euro that gives you lots of planning and resource optimization opportunities&nbsp;without many of the hazards that usually come with this class of games: systemic imbalance, reliance on brute-force&nbsp;analysis, downtime, effective player&nbsp;elimination. Worker placement games can be especially problematic, since they rely on figuring out how "hot" various action spaces are which requires you figure out not only what each space is worth to you, but what it is worth to every other player. This contention for spaces is a very limited element in Tzolk'in, and you virtually never have to do this sort of analytical heavy lifting. Another nice feature is that Tzolk'in is only minimally about infrastructure development, so early choices don't weigh particularly heavily and it's about making good choices for the whole game.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Tzolk'in feels tight, moves at a good pace, and while it presents you with interesting tactical and strategic choices, it doesn't require or reward excessive forward-looking analysis at the&nbsp;expense of strategic judgement.</span></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Tzok'in is definitely quite different in texture from the first generation of euros – it's not as mechanically tight, has a much&nbsp;broader canvas of options, and is quite complicated by 1995-2005 standards. However, the core elements do feel a lot like these classics: focussed, with tight pacing, good balance, and nicely&nbsp;presented. Because I found the gear gimmick distracting, it took me a&nbsp;little bit to understand that was what Tzolk'in was. Once I figured it out, I quite enjoyed it.</span></div></div>Chris Farrellhttps://plus.google.com/107526139736953433093noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-914191259119493058.post-56307504952288276972013-10-26T18:47:00.000-07:002013-10-26T20:10:45.965-07:00Trains<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">On first inspection, Trains looks like a bigger Dominion rip-off than usual. It's got the basic structure we have come to know and love (draw and cycle 5 cards each turn; choose 8 random stacks of cards available to buy at the beginning of each game; copper, silver, and gold have been renamed Limited, Express, and Limited Express trains).&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A significant number of the action cards even are just Dominion cards rephrased and with new titles.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As always, though, raw mechanics just aren't that revealing on their own. It's how mechanics are put together and calibrated to produce an effect that is interesting, and here Trains is&nbsp;<i>very</i>&nbsp;different from Dominion.</span><br /><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The idea in Trains is that&nbsp;you are a railway company building to connect cities and suburbs. For now they're in Japan, because that's where the designer is from; two&nbsp;hex grid&nbsp;maps for the environs of Tokyo and Osaka are&nbsp;on a double-sided board.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You build track to connect those urban areas.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Stations the players construct in those urban areas are worth points when you connect them. In order to do these things, you use two core types of cards, around which all else revolves: Rail Building and Station Expansion. There are a few other ways to get points –&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">you can buy the&nbsp;equivalent of Provinces (Skyscrapers), Duchies (Towers), and Estates (Apartments), which go into your deck as deadweight – but these points&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">are marginal</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;in most cases. You can win with a&nbsp;very limited rail-building strategy with extreme card mixes, but for the most part it's about building the stations and rails.</span></div></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The kicker, and the thing that&nbsp;makes the game hang together in interesting ways, is Waste. Anytime you do any of these things that help you win (build rails, build stations, or buy VP cards) you add one or more&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Waste</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;to your deck.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Waste</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;is just a dead card – it's not worth negative points like a Curse, it doesn't have deleterious effects like a Disease, but it does cramp your style. There aren't many reasonable ways to play the game&nbsp;that won't involve getting rather a lot of&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Waste</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;into your deck over time. How to manage your&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Waste</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;is a key strategic&nbsp;choice, ranging from very aggressively trying to get rid of it via the action cards that allow you to recycle or landfill it to ignoring it, trying to counterbalance by purchasing lots of positive cards, and hoping it doesn't hurt you too much.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Waste</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;is what gives Trains its unique feel. With its many expansions Dominion is pretty wide-ranging (I admit I checked out back around Prosperity), but basically it's a game about maximizing your chances of a monster hand you could use to buy expensive but high value-density Provinces. Once your deck started clicking, it accelerated rapidly to the&nbsp;end since the Province cards&nbsp;themselves weren't a&nbsp;significant drag. Because of the stream of&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Waste</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;in Trains, instead of optimizing for the monster hand you're&nbsp;generally&nbsp;trying to make sure you can do at least something useful as often as possible. Usually that means Rail Laying or Station Expansion plus some cash. You almost always need card combinations to move forward (Rail Laying cards don't&nbsp;come with cash), which makes keeping your deck balanced crucial. When it comes to building rails and stations, cash is key but it's rare you'll need really large ($5+) amounts; but you will need to build&nbsp;a few&nbsp;expensive connections, so you do need to make sure your have that capability. You can do all this the with some amount of&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Waste</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;in your deck, but beyond a certain point it starts to throttle you, and you need to make sure you don't drown in it. This balancing act is then further complicated and made interesting by the many action cards that allow you to do Dominion-esqe card and deck management.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The other major positive effect of&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Waste</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;is that it gives the game a pulse, a push-and-pull that is absent from almost all&nbsp;deckbuilders. Because of the nature of card randomness, you'll usually go through bursts of activity which add a lot of&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Waste</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;to your deck, and need decide whether to ignore it and press ahead, add action cards to your deck to deal with it, or spend time to remove it (you can pass your turn to remove all the&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Waste</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;in your hand). As&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Waste</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;is added to and removed from your deck in chunks, and as the randomness of the card flow takes its toll, each deck cycle has a different feel. Sometimes it's about improving efficiency, sometimes it's about building things, sometimes it's a balance, and sometimes it's about powering ahead in the face of declining efficiency. It's not impossible for Dominion to have this feel also with the right card mix; but in Trains,&nbsp;creating this ebb and flow – key to making a narrative game interesting – is an essential element of the design.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There are a number of key things that Trains wisely did <i>not</i>&nbsp;import from Dominion.&nbsp;There are no limits on buys and actions; buy and play as many cards as you want. Getting rid of these inorganic limits makes for more intuitive play, makes lower-cost cards more worthwhile, and gets rid&nbsp;of boring "+ action" and "+ buy" cards.&nbsp;Other than for&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Waste</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp; there is no card removal, so there are no boring deck-pruning strategies and you're simply going to have to deal with eventual deck bloat.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Also gone are attack cards, replaced by the more interesting on-board competition for routes and cities. Track is owned by players but stations are neutral, so there is an incentive to leech off of other players' networks. You can never be blocked from a space, but it costs&nbsp;extra (both in money and&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Waste</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp; to build where&nbsp;someone else already is. There are definitely cooperative-competitive tensions, although I think in general the high costs of building into other players' networks rewards getting there first – it's definitely not impossible to win by building up your own isolated track and station network. As always,&nbsp;though, the mix of cards available for purchase can change the balance between building and leeching somewhat.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Like Dominion, Trains offers you 8 random sets of cards to build your deck from as the game goes on. There are a number of game-changer cards: The Tourist Train can make winning with a small deck, minimal on-board network, and lots of VP cards viable; The Freight Train offers dramatically easier&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Waste</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;disposal; Collaboration makes building into other players' networks and cities much easier. Because your deck generally has to do more&nbsp;fundamental&nbsp;things (build rails, stations, remove w</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">aste</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, generate cash) than other deck-builders, there seems to be a wider variety of interesting cards for any given situation, and games rarely revolve entirely around one or two big power-cards. Like all of these games, it seems likely that Trains will need expansions to maintain long-term interest once players mine out the balance implications&nbsp;of many cards. That having been said, I think Trains gets great mileage out of it's 30 or so different cards, and is much less&nbsp;susceptible to boring or degenerate mixes. I'm a hardened&nbsp;veteran of deck-building games, and Trains has yet to feel&nbsp;repetitive after 15 plays (Trains is very easy to teach and relatively short at about 45 minutes).</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Trains looks like a Dominion ripoff – especially if you just read some card texts – but it most certainly is not. Clearly a lot of thought has gone into how to create a game with a very different texture. Instead of a pure race based on one powerful combo or a couple key cards at the outset, you have to make turn-to-turn and&nbsp;deck cycle-to-cycle decisions based on&nbsp;evolving game state. Instead of a relatively themeless game of interacting card powers, you have a clearly realized theme of building up infrastructure and capabilities in order to expand a physical network. I tend to like deck-building games generally, but Trains really hits a sweet spot for me, and it shows how powerfully a coherent design focus can work to breathe life into a game.</span></div>Chris Farrellhttps://plus.google.com/107526139736953433093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-914191259119493058.post-80160330129199649312013-10-24T23:49:00.001-07:002013-10-24T23:49:37.760-07:00Guns of Gettysburg<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Gettysburg is a battle which has spawned a ton of wargames. Which, just from a gaming standpoint, seems odd. It was a battle where the Confederates had very little chance of achieving any meaningful military victory. It mostly featured them impaling themselves on extremely strong Union defensive positions. The Union on the other hand is usually completely reactive, as they entrench on the historical lines and throw the dice to resist Confederate frontal assaults. Most games which study the historical battle as it developed degenerate into marginally interesting slugfests.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Guns of Gettysburg&nbsp;brings a&nbsp;refreshing new perspective. Instead of trying to simulate the historical events, the design instead asks: what is the one big thing about Gettysburg – not individual elements like the fighting at Little Round Top, but an overarching thing – that was interesting? And let's do that instead. The answer Bowen Simmons has is that Gettysburg was an accidental battle.&nbsp;Nobody really wanted to fight there, but that's where the armies ran into each other and as reinforcements came pouring in the battle escalated. The importance of&nbsp;Cemetery Ridge was not inherent, it was just that's where the Union line ended up and Confederates couldn't walk away. Although the game deploys an impressive density of interesting design elements, this is the core idea that makes Guns of Gettysburg not just work, but be one of the most fascinating game designs to come along in years.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Starting from the premise that Gettysburg was a confused meeting engagement, not a set-piece, Guns of Gettysburg does three key things.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The first is to make unit arrival random, and combine this with victory conditions that move as the battle progresses. Divisions and corps from both sides show up at random times and in random order, although within a broadly historical structure. As a player, you'll know which units are arriving next on each incoming road, but not when they're going to show up. Obviously, this means that it's possible the Confederates (or Union) could&nbsp;have almost their entire army show up before noon on the first day, while&nbsp;their opponent get only token reinforcements until late in the evening. Obviously, this changes the entire face of the&nbsp;battle and would be a&nbsp;recipe for dire play balance if we were fighting for a fixed set of objectives. So, Guns of Gettysburg deploys a simple but very&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">clever objective system. The Union line is initially defined by three objective areas which starts out near McPherson's ridge in the center, Warfield's Ridge on the left, and Culp's Hill on the right. They have to hold all three to win. Each hour on the first day that the Confederates have the preponderance of force on the map, the Union can move one of these objectives back one area, generally to more defensible terrain that is closer to the Union reinforcement areas and further from the Confederates. This is evaluated turn-by-turn, and because the exact contours of future reinforcements are unknown, you're never quite sure where the line is going to end up. This is a big source of tension for the Union player. You'll need to deploy your initial forces pretty far forward to hold the line, but you'll probably also have to withdraw as the Confederates do enjoy better reinforcement odds on the first day. Timing&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and executing&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">that&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">withdrawal is the key to&nbsp;surviving the initial contact as the Union.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Second is that the design recognizes the fact that Gettysburg was a battle of sharp engagements and long pauses to reorganize, extend lines, and gather strength. This causes problems for games&nbsp;with fixed time scales – a lot of the time not a lot is happening. Guns of Gettysburg gives us variable length turns. If one side is attacking, turns are an hour each. If both sides are holding, though, turns telescope out to as many as 5 or 6 hours. These long turns allow the player with the initiative to execute longer line-extension marches that the defender has to try to anticipate. Bundling these long turns really speeds up these periods of maneuver and focuses the game on important decisions.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Lastly is the way that the game takes a lot of complexity and designs it into the physical components – in this case the&nbsp;mapboard – instead of writing a lot of rules. I've always said that one of the things that made Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage so powerful is that it took a lot of what would traditionally have been special "chrome" rules that you would have to keep in your mind all the time (Sicilian grain,&nbsp;Syracuse's mixed loyalties, Rome's manpower advantages) and puts them into the card deck, with dramatic improvements in the game's playability and flavor. Guns of Gettysburg does something similar, elegantly offloading complicated terrain, line of sight, and fire zone rules onto the design of the&nbsp;game board itself. This is not to say that the rules for ridges and fire zones are simple, or that the map is visually easy to parse; they are not, and it can definitely be confusing until you get the hang of what it's trying to do (it doesn't help that the rules are not written as clearly as one might hope). However, once you've figured out the design, it packs a ton of interesting terrain detail into a very clean system. No more stringing line-of-site threads, calculating height differentials and slopes and blind zones, counting ranges, or arguing about exactly how many tree&nbsp;symbols are in a hex. The map itself takes care of everything.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">These are the three&nbsp;big things that make Guns of Gettysburg a fascinating game. What makes it a <i>great</i>&nbsp;game is that everything surrounding these big ideas is also carefully crafted. T</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">he abstract system for artillery is simple yet captures a lot (when you withdraw you give up artillery positions, for example, and it takes time to reestablish them). The rules for command posture </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(attack, hold, or withdraw) are&nbsp;simple but make for tough, authentic choices.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Going into&nbsp;detail on all the little things the game does right would&nbsp;involve writing more than you likely want to read, so I'll leave them for you discover as you learn the game.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is both the games greatest strength, and – to the extent it has one – its greatest weakness. Because Guns of Gettysburg resembles the best eurogames, designed from the ground up for a specific purpose and to create a specific effect, and not&nbsp;particularly&nbsp;beholden to any prior wargame design conventions, it can be hard to come to grips with. With 13 fairly&nbsp;dense&nbsp;pages of rules it's considerably more complicated than any eurogame, and you really need to understand all the rules and their implications to understand the whole game. Usually when I learn a new wargame like France '40 or FAB: Sicily or Crown of Roses (just to pick a few at random), I can just glance at big sections of the rules since I know how ZOC bonds or step reductions or ops cards work in general and I just need to learn the particular game's quirks. Even if you've played Napoleon's Triumph, Guns of Gettysburg is a largely unique game that has to be understood in its entirety. The game is quite intuitive in a lot of ways because&nbsp;of how effectively it models many things, and once you understand the premise and motivation of&nbsp;the design it all follows quite logically from them.&nbsp;Nonetheless,</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;there are tricky details to&nbsp;nail down and it'll probably take you a game or two to feel like you're playing it correctly, understanding it, and bending it to your will.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's totally worth it though. Guns of Gettysburg for me stands alongside top-of-the-line games of any genre and shows the potential of the game not just as as an interesting and&nbsp;engaging hobby but as a&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">truly expressive form. For me it joins games like Modern Art, Beowulf, Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage, Sekigahara, Rommel in the Desert, and Ashen Stars –</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;skillfully-executed games that have great and compelling game systems that serve&nbsp;narrative purpose and are fully&nbsp;melded to the presentation of interesting, relevant, and enlightening ideas. Games like this are the reason I'm in this hobby, and a joy to discover.</span>Chris Farrellhttps://plus.google.com/107526139736953433093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-914191259119493058.post-34027998871332596512013-09-26T22:42:00.003-07:002013-09-26T22:56:20.117-07:00In Praise of the Adequate<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I was pointed to this fun NYT&nbsp;<a href="http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/24/sign-of-the-times-the-virtues-of-fine-in-the-age-of-awesome-2/?smid=fb-nytimes&amp;WT.z_sma=TM_SOT_20130924&amp;_r=1">article about personal satisfaction</a> by Sarah Vowell's Facebook feed:</span><br /><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 23px;">"Not everything has to be great. Maybe it’s a thrill to watch things become great. Maybe it’s healthy to feel that a meal is reasonable, that a performance had its moments, that a trip was fun in parts, that a person is engaging and you look forward to finding out what they’re really like, that last night’s sex was nice. In my slow but persistent bid for the reader’s sanity, I hereby prescribe a period of allowing things to be adequate."</span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 23px;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 23px;">I agree. So, to wit, a few pleasingly adequate games I've played in the recent or not-so-recent past and that otherwise I might not bother to write about:</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 23px;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 23px;"><b>Arctic&nbsp;Scavengers: </b>While deck-building is an inherently engaging design pattern, that doesn't mean it's easy to do something interesting and different. I like&nbsp;</span><span style="line-height: 23px;">Arctic&nbsp;Scavengers&nbsp;for its chaos and&nbsp;uncertainty, because it's designed on a standard deck-building core and yet goes in a completely different direction, and because of its effective communication design. Players are trying to build a tribe in a post-apocolyptic, nuclear-winter scenario, and the tropes of the genre – scavenging for equipment,&nbsp;skirmishes&nbsp;over scarce resources, bringing together scattered specialists – are all authentically there. I also like the new idea it brings to the game genre, that of building buildings which provide a permanent effect that helps you manage the chaos of the card flow. Is it a classic? No. But it pleasingly and effectively does what it sets out to do.</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 23px;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 23px;"><b>DC Comics Deckbuilding:</b>&nbsp;Another deckbuilder, this is essentially Cryptozoic ripping off and re-theming Ascension (these comments apply more or less equally to the Lord of the Rings Deckbuilders, just choose which franchise you like best). The artistry here is not in the mechanics of the design, but in the application of new paint. It nicely hits all the touchstones of the genre, and all your favorite characters are here in more or less plausible versions of themselves. Also, all the games include many more attack cards (thematically keyed to defeated enemies) and fewer "permanents" (Ascension constructs) which gives them a bit more feeling of fluidity. &nbsp;</span><span style="line-height: 23px;">It's certainly not thematically rich, being closer to the Monopoly re-themes than to Lord of the Rings or even Cryptozoic's own The Hobbit, but when the underlying game is excellent and reasonably appropriate to the genre you could do a lot worse.</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 23px;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 23px;"><b>Indigo:</b>&nbsp;Classic Knizian elegance, this ones sees us building paths for stones that start on a central tile, trying to guide them to our scoring gates which are spaced out around the outside edge of the hexagonal playing board. The twist is that many gates are controlled by two players, both of whom will score when a stone exits. Natural alliances grow in various areas of the board as turn order and shared gates work for or against different player pairings. Abstract and not that deep, there is still a lot more here than a cursory glance might reveal, and the physical design of the game is very attractive. This is a prototypical nice game.</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 23px;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 23px;"><b>Infiltration:</b>&nbsp;This brings with it the usual hazards of Fantasy Flight Games: tiny fonts and questionable presentation decisions make it physically hard to play for older gamers. Still, this is a nice, short push-your-luck game with Vaccarinio's trademark of lots of interacting cards (rooms that you infiltrate through, in this incarnation) with special rules. What makes Infiltration for me is how nicely it pulls in the elements of the heist story: a ticking clock working relentlessly against you while you dodge internal security and deploy your fancy, high-tech equipment. The Android&nbsp;</span><span style="line-height: 23px;">universe is also colorful and nicely-drawn.</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 23px;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="line-height: 23px;">Smash-Up:</b><span style="line-height: 23px;">&nbsp;The central idea of this game is to get at the good stuff from deck-building games, while minimizing the risks of degenerate card offerings, runaway leaders, small early&nbsp;misjudgments&nbsp;dooming you, and other hazards of the genre. You "build" your deck out of two halves of flavored cards (Zombies bring cards back out of the discard pile, Dinosaurs have raw combat power,&nbsp;Leprechauns&nbsp;move cards around and change rules in combat, Ninjas sneakily show up right before scoring, and so on) to create Zombie Ninjas, Alien Dinosaurs, and other inherently entertaining combinations. It's a nice mix of the zany with an interesting tactical/resource management game that gets much of the fun of deckbuilders without some of the downsides. Plus, it has really good art and even uses adequate font sizes! It maybe runs just a touch long and is a little thinky for what it is, but is still a nicely-put-together game.</span></span></div></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 23px;"><b>Star Trek Catan:</b>&nbsp;It's more or less straight Catan, but the one mechanical addition – crew cards with special powers that you can keep for a short time – accelerate the game slightly, add some nice flexibility with things like relocating ships (roads), flexible bank trading, and add some more ways to help players catch up. The Federation Space expansion map is a nice touch and even includes episode references. The little plastic Enterprises and general presentation is also quite nice, although the fonts on the crew cards are ludicrously small. Catan is almost 20 years old at this point, but it's still a classic game and fun to play a spruced-up version.</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Uchronia:&nbsp;</b>Glory to Rome was a game I think I always wanted to like more than I actually did. Despite the hugely appealing interplay of quirky special powers, it had a problem with punishing luck (you can be out of it in 15 minutes if you fail to draw a decent bootstrap combo early) and very little tolerance for players' mistakes, with apparently minor errors easily throwing the game. This can lead to a lot of irritation for non-experts. Uchronia files off many of these rough edges and makes for a more streamlined, pleasing experience. It's lost the quirky insanity of the original, which admittedly was a significant element of the draw; it's also got a wretched rulebook that seems to uses terminology designed to be obtuse, and the fonts are (again) too small for how they are used in the real world. But get past this, and there is a solid game underneath that takes the well-conceived construction metaphor from Glory to Rome and turns it into a game more people will find engaging.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">After a few dry years for new hobby boardgames, for me the last year or so has been great – in no small part due to plenty of solid, decent new games like this. Here's looking forward to more of them.</span></div>Chris Farrellhttps://plus.google.com/107526139736953433093noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-914191259119493058.post-13621087180487635242013-09-10T17:16:00.000-07:002013-09-10T18:05:11.659-07:00Star Wars: Edge of the Empire<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_minisite.asp?eidm=232&amp;enmi=Star%20Wars:%20Edge%20of%20the%20Empire">Star Wars: Edge of the Empire</a> is Fantasy Flight's attempt to bring the Star Wars universe to tabletop roleplaying, and by my count this is the third or fourth crack at this general problem. Wizards of the Coast had two iterations using a d20-based system and while they produced some great sourcebooks, the feel of the gameplay was, to me, never right. West End Games' Star Wars game was old school, and while it had its moments and makes a virtue of elegance, it feels dated today.</span><br /><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Star Wars presents significant obstacle to being adapted as a roleplaying game. I wrote a piece on GUMSHOE&nbsp;<a href="http://illuminatinggames.blogspot.com/2011/03/trail-of-cthulhu-games-as-stories-tales.html">a couple years ago</a>, about how classic RPGs built on simple task resolution systems have a hard time evoking the feel of many popular genres, including mysteries, thrillers, and epics. It can be done, but's down to the players to do all the heavy lifting without any support from the game system itself.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">GUMSHOE</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;attacks these problems by baking the tropes and conventions of the procedural&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">mystery&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">genre into the game system, giving the players the support they need.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Star Wars is not a mystery, though. It isn't even obviously procedural, although&nbsp;there are procedural threads in the prequels.&nbsp;For me, Star Wars defies easy categorization. It's &nbsp;a romance, it's an epic, it's fantasy, it's drama. In some ways it's a fairy story, in other ways it's a nuanced allegory. It resembles&nbsp;a&nbsp;hero's quest, but like Lord of the Rings it veers off-course in the final act. The narratives are built on timeless structures,&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">yet are also tightly bound to the eras that spawned them (the 60s and 70s for the originals, the 90s and 00s for the prequels).</span></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Adding further complexity, there is the question of what people consider canon. For me, it's the 6 movies plus the Clone Wars TV show, and I want nothing to do with tie-in books or video games and the Extended Universe in general. But, some people disavow the prequel trilogies, others like the much more pulpy, super-heroic books, and now there are books that run the gamut of genre mash-ups. Some players grew up playing Dark Forces or Knights of the Old Republic or X-Wing and it will please them to see elements of those stories&nbsp;recognized..</span></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">These are the core questions that a Star Wars RPG has to wrestle with and find&nbsp;answers&nbsp;to in 2013: what, exactly, is Star Wars? And can we get everyone at the table to more or less agree on an answer?</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">---</span></div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Edge of the Empire reminds me of The One Ring, which I <a href="http://illuminatinggames.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-one-ring-rpg.html">reviewed last year</a>. Task resolution involves a set of customized dice built into a pool: add positive 8 and 12-siders &nbsp;for your level of skill, negative 8 and 12-siders for the level of difficulty, throw in some d6s for situational modifiers, gather up all the dice, roll them, and try to keep them all on the table (difficulty level: average, modified by your table's elasticity). Net out the success and failure symbols to see if you succeeded. The twist, and why rolling all these dice is interesting, is that in addition to success or failure symbols there are also threat and advantage symbols along with their more powerful cousins despair and triumph. They are netted out similarly to successes and failures, and can serve both mechanical and narrative purposes. In combat, threat and advantage tends to be spent in well-specified, crunchy ways to score critical hits, use weapon or character special powers, or create a temporary situational advantage</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">. Outside of combat, they are used as narrative hooks to allow you to succeed at tasks with complications, or to fail but gain some advantage, or some other mix.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A typical test will involve rolling maybe 6 dice. The character will get 3 for a skill he or she is reasonably good at (say two ability dice plus one proficiency die), while a moderately difficult task will add 3 difficulty dice. Perhaps one more will be added as a boost or setback for external circumstances. These are all information-rich dice. The ability (and difficulty) dice have only one blank face, with the rest having 5 distinct mixes of one or two success (failure) and/or advantage (threat) symbols. The proficiency and challenge dice are similarly dense and add triumph and despair symbols. Assembling and rolling a dice pool and figuring out the results is not entirely trivial, much more involved than adding up numbers and looking for&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Tengwars&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">in The One Ring, or netting out successes on FUDGE dice.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I like this. Because there is weight associated with die rolls – both mechanically and creatively because you have to be prepared to figure out what to do with threats and advantages – it encourages you to make rolls only when the results are going to be interesting. If after rolling the dice, you're routinely drawing a blank on what to do with the resulting threats or advantages, you're doing it wrong and rolling for too many routine tasks. At the same time, building the pool is fairly intuitive, and adding a setback die to a check for, say, being under time pressure is more interesting and generates more tension than just giving you a -2 to your d20 or increasing your success threshold by 1.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This dice pool compares interestingly to Fate, a game system that seems to have influenced Edge of the Empire significantly. In that game, fate point give the players interesting narrative control over a skill check by allowing them to tag their own aspects or things in the environment for bonuses. In combat in Fate, I might spend a Fate point to tag a "venting gas leak" for a&nbsp;+2 bonus to my shot as my character uses it for cover to get into a better firing position. Most of your creative energy goes into the setup of the challenge and ends after the dice are rolled. By contrast, in Edge of the Empire (as in The One Ring), you say what you're trying to do, roll the dice, look at the pool, and create the outcome out of the mixture of success, advantage, and threat. So if I get a couple of Advantage symbols, maybe a stray shot creates a venting gas leak that another player can use as cover in the future (giving a setback die to shots aimed at her). The rules are mealy-mouthed on how much control players get over their advantage results, especially outside of combat, but I'd suggest that by default if the player has a good idea you should go with it. This has the nice feature that creativity always feels like it's rewarded. If you spend energy coming up with some creative tagging in Fate you can still blow the check, in which case it's easy to feel like it was all for naught. Advantage and threat in Edge of the Empire are the result of an interesting die roll.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A vital&nbsp;ancillary&nbsp;system is Destiny points. These are analogous to Fate's Fate points. At the start of the game, you randomly assemble a pool of Destiny points on their light or dark side, one or two per player. The light points are spent by the players to upgrade&nbsp;characters'&nbsp;dice for a skill check, the dark points by the GM to improve&nbsp;difficulty dice. Once spent, they flip. Crucially, the can also be used by the players in a free-form way to introduce a true fact about the galaxy in a the same way as making a declaration with a Fate point (and with a similar narrative affect to making a GUMSHOE investigative spend). This covers a lot of ground, from simply declaring you have available the equipment you need even if it's not on your character sheet, to allowing you to use your skills in unexpected ways or creating NPC relationships. Like Fate, the rule is just that it has to be interesting and meet with the GM's approval.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The final piece of the puzzle is a character's Obligation.&nbsp;Recent RPGs have taken to building some sort of genre-appropriate&nbsp;motivation descriptor into character generation, a descriptor that has significant mechanical implications. Whether it's GUMSHOE's drives or Fate's Aspects, they can work as a hammer to make characters do something risky and interesting when a more reasonable response might be to turtle or not act. In a GUMSHOE game, the Drives provided for the setting tell you a lot about what it's like. The drives in Night's Black Agents are quite different from the ones in Ashen Stars. A Fate character's Aspects, although tricky to get right, can provide a useful tool for the GM to propel action.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Obligation is the analog in&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Edge of the Empire, and here we finally get to the nub of what kind of Star Wars story we're doing. Each character starts with one, with a rating of maybe between 5 and 20 (starting rating varies with the number of players, and you can add more to get more stuff). The off-the-shelf Obligations are things like Criminal, Debt, Bounty, Blackmail, and Betrayal, although they also include Dutybound, Family, Oath, and Obsession. The rating indicates the&nbsp;likelihood&nbsp;that the Obligation will intrude on whatever the players are doing. The GM makes a percentile roll before each session (not unlike the Icon relationship roll in 13th Age) and if it comes in below the group's total obligation level, one of the obligations kicks in, adding a complication to the story.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This should tell you&nbsp;who's&nbsp;stories we're looking at here: those of Han Solo, Chewbacca, and Lando Calrissian. They're the only main characters in the movies that have clear obligations (Debt to Jabba the Hutt, an Oath to protect Han, and Responsibility for Cloud City). None of the other characters in the classic trilogy have anything resembling an Obligation. Some of the prequel characters seem like they might – maybe Obsession for Anakin, or Duty for Padmé – but the Obligation mechanics don't work for their stories. Obligations represent some external force that can benefit the character, but can also have external consequences – again, very similar to 13th Age Icon relationships or a Source of Stability in a pulp Trail of Cthulhu game. Anakin's Obsession in the prequels is clearly a GUMSHOE Drive, a personal imperative that you violate only at a personal psychological cost, and not the external Edge of the Empire Obligation.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, we're telling Han Solo's story. More specifically, we're telling Han Solo's story before he links up with Luke and Ben. Although this might sound limiting, creativity requires boundaries, and it's actually empowering for both players and GMs as long as they take the hint and are not distracted by the fact that the game has unwisely included lightsabers in the equipment list (despite the fact that the game offers no way to gain access to the skill for using them). Star Wars is a big universe, exponentially more so once you throw in the EU, and players can come to the table with a wide range of understandings and expectations. So picking one clear aspect of the universe and developing it is a good way to both make your game robust, set expectations, and get all the players on the same page.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I know Fantasy Flight primarily through their boardgames (I've never played Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying 3rd Edition, which Edge of the Empire apparently has some similarities to), and I think of their design sensibilities as fairly retro. By contrast, Edge of the Empire is a contemporary design clearly much more influenced by Fate and GUMSHOE than d20 or GURPS. Still, the dice pool task resolution system is much more concrete, more nuanced, and&nbsp;finicky than anything in a rules-light game, and things like weapon lists and capabilities (different weapons have different powers that can be activated through spending advantage symbols), character abilities, and space combat actions are spelled out in crunchy detail. The game is trying to give at least something to all of <a href="http://www.sjgames.com/robinslaws/">Robin's Laws</a> Power Gamers, Butt-Kickers, Method Actors, and Storytellers.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I really like the total package here. The game that I've played that is closest in feel to Edge of the Empire is The One Ring, but I feel like Edge of the Empire's dice pool is more nuanced which allows it to have a crunchier, more flavorful and interesting combat system, although as a result it has to be used somewhat sparingly.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The wide range of dice results combined with character powers and explicit combat options give players who enjoy those elements something to get their teeth into, and the point-purchase system of advancement lets players grow their character sheets.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Outside of combat, the Destiny Pool imports some useful ideas from Fate and gives the system a touch of epic-ness while still remaining grounded. The Obligations carve off a nice, constrained element of the Star Wars space and lets you develop ideas there and avoid many of the pitfalls of generic Star Wars gaming.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The key to enjoying Edge of the Empire is embracing these constraints. I played once with a GM who wanted to run a Jedi-centric (of course) post-Order 66 story arc, so home-brewed some force rules and introduced dramatic emotional complications between the pre-generated player&nbsp;characters&nbsp;and generally tried to force the game to be something it isn't. This is a&nbsp;recipe&nbsp;for pain. While there is no reason why an adventure like this couldn't&nbsp;work in theory, when confronted with it in practice the players likely won't have a&nbsp;common&nbsp;touchstone to use to respond to it, and harnessing player creativity is so key to making these games work.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The single biggest challenge to roleplaying in the universes of Lucas or Tolkien or Lovecraft – universes that have taken on lives of their own as they have became embedded in the popular culture – is often simply getting everyone at the table to understand and agree on the tone and theme of the game before you start. Edge of the Empire is not a game about dramatic conflict, or epic confrontations, or the hero's journey, even though those may be elements of Star Wars. It's about making a living in the grey areas of the galaxy while perhaps brushing up against the epic conflict. Take advantage of this clear direction, and embrace what the game does well.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">After having said good things about the Edge of the Empire game system, I have to mention the massive complication that is the actual Edge of the Empire core rulebook. It is dire. While it has a nice layout and the art ranges from passable to excellent, the font sizes – especially on the tables – are small and hard to read. The text is dense and poorly organized. The prose is leaden and the rules are poorly explained. Never, for example, are the actual mechanics of a skill check properly spelled out! The core mechanic of the dice pool – which is&nbsp;straightforward&nbsp;and which I can explain to a player in a couple minutes – takes 10 pages of dense, wordy description with liberal use of copy and paste combined with search and replace. The bane of Fantasy Flight's boardgame rules is badly-ordered or unstructured &nbsp;explanations which rarely give you the context to actually understand what you're reading (I talked about how to do this properly in an old piece <a href="http://illuminatinggames.blogspot.com/2009/01/on-rules.html">on rules</a>), and this is on full display here also. You really get the sense that the writers must have been paid by the pound, given how the rules seem to have been structured to maximize the amount of repetition required and how often they feel the need to brutally over-explain simple concepts.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Star Wars: Edge of the Empire is not a complicated game. It's not rules-light, but it compares favorably with Fate-based games or The One Ring in terms of how difficult it is to play. It's just that the book makes it seem three to four times as complicated as it actually is. Having been spoiled recently by fantastic Pelgrane products, just reading Edge of the Empire was an epic struggle.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The section on GMing the game is also frustratingly useless for anyone reading this blog, as it deals with many peripheral issues (maybe you can find players online! or at your local game store!) without ever seriously tackling anything important: things like adventure themes, structure, and tone. Interestingly, a number of excellent, concrete, and useful tips that are included in the Beginner's Game box set (fail forward; say "yes, but"; don't roll the dice if success and failure aren't both interesting; don't let forward momentum stop just because of a failed check) are nowhere to be found in the core book.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The rest of the supporting material is OK. The adversaries list is solid. The list of ships is a bit thin, but OK. The Galactic Guide is a nice if somewhat meandering overview of the Star Wars universe which unfortunately does not focus on the actual premise of the game, the Obligated character.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Again, though, the whole thing is compromised by a prose style that I consider basically unreadable. If you're like me, you'll read it just enough to figure out the core systems and&nbsp;design intent, get some stats for stormtroopers,&nbsp;and probably never go back to it again except for some tables. You've watched the movies. You really don't need any more background than that – more information may in fact be unhelpful – and adversaries and starships don't have that many stats to generate.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">---</span></div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I liked Edge of the Empire. With the huge caveat of the quality of the writing, I think it's the best take on Star Wars by far. The dice pool is versatile and provides useful hooks when used efficiently, and helps to narratively empower the players if the GM so desires. Other supporting elements are borrowed from proven systems. Obligations may not seem like a lot, but they are vital in setting the tone and character of the game. While the book doesn't provide the support that one might hope, the game system itself provides enough structure for an experienced GM to run with and gives players opportunities to both play creatively and trick out their characters with cool powers and gear. While it certainly lacks the elegance and professionalism of a Robin Laws or Kenneth Hite game, there is still a lot to like here.</span></div>Chris Farrellhttps://plus.google.com/107526139736953433093noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-914191259119493058.post-14578264145062919032013-07-24T23:31:00.000-07:002013-07-25T09:30:50.419-07:00The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Knizia)<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There has been a recent avalanche of Hobbit games, for some reason. When Knizia designed his classic&nbsp;<a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/823/lord-of-the-rings">Lord of the Rings</a> game back in 2000 it didn't have to worry&nbsp;much about collisions in the namespace. Now, everyone is on the Hobbit bandwagon and nobody knows what I'm talking about when I mention I'd like to play The Hobbit. Knizia himself has done three different Hobbit games. Recently. Plus another in the back catalog. Anyway, this one is published&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">by&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Cryptozoic and is a cooperative game hearkening back to Lord of the Rings – but this time with dice instead of cards, and working from a different set of thematic ideas as befits the differences in tone between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.</span><br /><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Knizia wrote a book called <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0973105216/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0973105216&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=illumigames-20">Dice Games Properly Explained</a> in which he described the history and workings of different types of dice games. The Hobbit is&nbsp;identifiably&nbsp;a category dice game, in the same family as Yahtzee. Each turn you roll four custom dice with running, diplomacy, and fighting symbols, trying to match different challenges on the board (Keep the Troll William Talking, for example, requires 5 diplomacy). A set of running challenges make up the&nbsp;throughline&nbsp;of an episode and must be scored in order, while the rest can be done at any time. If you want to save any dice from your first roll, you must assign them to challenges, and then re-roll the rest. Fail to complete at least one challenge on your turn and you pay a penalty.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As usual for Knizia, the nuance of the game is then built on top of this clean and straightforward engine.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Tasks range in difficulty from easy (3 symbol matches) to formidable (8 symbol matches), the hardest requiring outrageous good fortune to complete without the many special powers the game gives you. The 14 members of the Company (13 Dwarves plus Bilbo) all have cards with one-use powers which will be dealt out to the players (re-rolls, access to the bonus gold die, extra symbols). These abilities can be used to your personal benefit, but also usually to benefit another player, albeit a slightly weaker version. Bifur for example, in addition to playing the clarinet, allows you an additional re-roll, or a re-roll of 2 white dice for someone else. Once used these powers are spent, although the game gives you quite a few opportunities to bring back used Company members for another spotlight moment.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">These Company powers are useful, but you will often find yourself in need of a bigger hammer. These are available in the form of resources like Gandalf (who doubles all your dice), The Contract (which allows you to recycle many Company members), The Map to Erebor (two extra diplomacy symbols), and, inevitably, Radagast's "Beasts" (4 extra running). These are powerful one-shots that will fittingly bail you out of trouble when your backs are against the wall, but cost you points to use. Your score at the end will be the sum of all your unused resources.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That's about it. Each turn you face a board full of challenges, and draw an event card which can add additional challenges, make existing challenges harder, or give you an additional obstacle to deal with this turn. You then roll, choose one or more dice to allocate to one or more challenges, and re-roll any unallocated dice. If you haven't then met at least one challenge, you lose points and a future resource – a fairly harsh penalty, so you have to keep moving.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As is typical for a Knizia design, the game gives you a great deal of flexibility (unlike the&nbsp;superficially&nbsp;similar Elder Sign which offers a much smaller decision space) and then tugs you in many different directions. You want to solve the challenges as quickly as possible, but if you sweep up all the easy ones while&nbsp;leaving&nbsp;all the hard ones on the table, it greatly increases your risk of failed turns. You need to keep your options open, picking off difficult challenges when the dice line up properly and keeping some easy ones in reserve for when you roll poorly – ideally even keeping a balance of fighting, running, and diplomacy challenges open. The big decisions revolve around how much risk to assume with the toughest challenges, when to make the big spend of a resource to finish those off, and when to take the hit or be satisfied with a lesser challenge for the turn – all as modified by turn-to-turn incidental events and the need to complete certain challenges in order.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The acid test of mechanical quality for cooperative games is whether there is enough on the table to engage several different minds in problem solving. Are four players on average going to do better than the one "best" player? The two classics in the genre attack this a little&nbsp;differently. In the case of Pandemic, the role cards give each player a different prism to look at the game through, which leads them to think in different ways which can then be debated and recombined. Knizia's Lord of the Rings also gives players identities with special powers, but they are less crucial. Lord of the Rings just makes the calculus of risk and reward so resistant to mathematical analysis that it deprives the players of straightforward answers even after many games. Patterns will emerge, but most decisions in the game are judgement calls and so players will often naturally come to different conclusion.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Hobbit embraces both, although not to the same degree as either. Your role identification is not as strong as it is in Pandemic, and neither is the math as&nbsp;intractable&nbsp;as in Lord of the Rings. However, both still work, and the combination is effective. You'll usually have a few Dwarves (and maybe a Hobbit) in front of you that only you can use, and that will give you a perspective the other players lack. These powers tend to be moderately strong, and the fact that they are stronger on your turn than they are on other players turns is a nice way to encourage you to try to set yourself up to deal with challenges you are going to have the best shot at, while still giving you tools to help the other players out.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Dice games often fall afoul of relatively easy odds calculation – probably one reason why there are relatively few good ones. <a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1420/monopoly-express">Monopoly Express</a> is a classic example of a game where the unambiguously best choice is only some fairly easy math away. Even in Roll Through the Ages, the cost-benefit math of a re-roll is reasonably straightforward. In Elder Sign the math is harder, but the available choices are too few for it to help. The Hobbit does better, and offers players a rich and interesting set of die-rolling choices for a fairly straight-ahead category dice game. Once you've committed to a given challenge, the odds of finishing it (without using powers) are usually not too complex, but that is not where the game is – the game is in deciding what tasks to attempt in the first place and when to use those powers, and those decisions are much more resistant to straightforward mathematical analysis given the number of challenges, special powers, and resources usually available. The need to commit dice in order to save them is the key element that drives game tension. By giving you a great deal of flexibility on where to commit after seeing your first roll, but then needing to lock in at least partially before seeing your final roll, the game nicely balances control against the tension of rolling dice for stakes.</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;Sometimes you'll roll well and the choices will be easy, but usually – especially on higher difficulty levels – you'll be somewhere&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">in-between</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;and the choices are not obvious.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The difficulty levels were a great and crucial feature of the original Lord of the Rings, and later cooperative games have not always managed this well despite the fact that&nbsp;appropriate&nbsp;difficulty is so key to this genre. The Hobbit does a good job here. If you start at level 0, you'll get a game that is easy to learn and while it won't be particularly challenging for cooperative game veterans, it's a good way to get into the game. Knizia then gives you point thresholds for when you should advance to the next level. Level 2 is still moderately easy, but level 4 starts turning the screws, and level 6 is tough. Level 8 is&nbsp;advertised&nbsp;as exceptionally difficult, and while I haven't made it there yet, I have no doubt that is true. Anyway, although I started at level 0, hardened gamers should probably consider starting at least at level 2. It should be mentioned though that unlike the life-or-death stakes of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit has a much more action-adventure feel and the game appropriately is more about scoring than about whether or not the Company is going to survive, at least until you hit the top difficulty tiers.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The narrative elements of The Hobbit are driven&nbsp;similarly&nbsp;to Lord of the Rings. Each episode or act of the story is represented by a board and a set of events, which the players must work through against a ticking clock. After completing the board, the players get a&nbsp;refresh, collect resources earned, and press on. The multi-act structure is great and avoids death-spiral games – if you're going to lose (which is pretty unlikely outside of the high difficulty levels), game tension is still maintained almost all of the way. In The Lord of the Rings, the narrative element was somewhat railroaded, which had the downside of predictability but the upside of keeping the&nbsp;narrative "beats" of tension going and avoiding the worst narrative lulls and crushes. The Hobbit is more free-form. The events are unique to each board but come in a random order. While they serve to mix up the game and keep you on your toes, they aren't as interestingly varied as allowed for by the scripted events in Lord of the Rings and so don't have as much texture and are not as evocative of the narrative of the movie. A lot of the drama and ebb and flow of the game is in coping with the vagaries of the dice themselves – not a bad way to go, but not as explicit.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">While my&nbsp;general impressions of The Hobbit have been very positive, there is also no question that it took a hit when Peter Jackson made his fateful decision to split two movies into 3 late in the game. Players travel through two episodes of adventures, The Shire &amp; Lonelands and Misty Mountains ... Gollum, Goblins, and Wargs, after which they are carried off by eagles and the game ends (if they make it). The second board offers nicely increased stakes and tougher challenges, and then an abrupt finish. There obviously should be a third act. There isn't. This is the game's biggest problem – one more board would clearly be more satisfying. Since the game is based on the movies rather than the books, we then have to dive into the morass of whether or not Peter Jackson knows what the heck he is doing in turning a nice, tightly-plotted 200-ish-page classic of children's literature into a bloated, 9 hour&nbsp;cinematic&nbsp;monstrosity. Obviously, my guess would be not, and the boardgame is&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">sadly&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">stuck having to work with the narrative mess of the movies. Knizia is legendary for his design economy, and economical is one descriptor I would not apply to Peter Jackson's The Hobbit. Thankfully Knizia's design elegance has done a better job at getting to the essence of film than Peter Jackson did.</span><br /><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Interestingly, though, The Hobbit does channel some of the flavor of the book. The story of the book is basically one of a bunch of not particularly&nbsp;competent&nbsp;dwarves going from adventure to adventure and repeatedly getting into more trouble than they can handle and requiring Gandalf or Bilbo to come along and bail them out. The game has a similar ebb and flow to it. While the Company will be able to handle the mundane tasks of getting from point A to point B, tackling the most difficult challenges will often require calling in bigger guns. The movie dwarves are rather more&nbsp;competent&nbsp;than their cousins in the book, and the game seems to split the difference. The little bits of personality the dwarves in the game have, with their individual special powers, is just about right. Balin and Gloin, the more senior dwarves, have extra die symbols. Fili and Kili, the youngest, have good powers that can't be shared. Thorin has the unique ability to give anyone a gold die – more leadership than he showed in the book, maybe, but it feels right.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'll just say a couple words on the physical design of the game, since in this sort of game art and presentation can make a big difference to the game's ambiance and ability to evoke its source material. In many cases Cryptozoic has done a good job. The Dwarf cards are well designed, use clear and large&nbsp;iconography&nbsp; and have a nice heft to them. The resources are similarly clear, although they could benefit from some art. The boards have nice scenic landscape shots on them. Although they compare unfavorably to the much more active Lord of the Rings boards, which show people or creatures doing things, on the other hand much of the board space is going to be covered with challenge cards most of the time so this is arguably better. But – oh dear. The font sizes. The names of the challenges on the board and cards are difficult to read at 2mm high, leaving the overall design with lots of dead space and looking boring. This doesn't cause a gameplay problem, but it does make it a bit harder to get into the spirit of the game when you can't really tell whether you are trying to finish "Split the Rock to Let the Light Through" or "Follow Bilbo Baggins to Rescue Him".</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I liked The Hobbit. It's a classic Knizia design, elegant in gameplay but with&nbsp;subtlety&nbsp;to the strategies. The characterizations and narrative elements are economical but very effective. Decision are fraught with ambiguity and risk. It doesn't ask the player to make unimportant or uninteresting decisions and doesn't waste their time. The mechanics of playing the game are kept to a minimum (just two rolls of the dice each turn) so the players can get on with the interesting discussion and decision making. The game has a narrative momentum and pulse, although like Lord of the Rings you'll need to move up through the difficulty levels to get the full experience. Unfortunately, while it's reasonably satisfying on its own, it won't feel complete until the Desolation of Smaug (at least) can be linked up to it. With only two boards, it still works, is short, and has all the elements I want from a medium-weight Knizia. But it feels truncated. I'm really looking forward to getting the full experience.</span></div>Chris Farrellhttps://plus.google.com/107526139736953433093noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-914191259119493058.post-225176240605885092013-07-15T18:26:00.001-07:002013-07-15T18:26:25.813-07:00Terra Mystica<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Terra Mystica was the last of the hot Essen '12 release I tried. And the first&nbsp;time out, I wasn't very impressed.</span><br /><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Especially if you're being taught by someone else and haven't personally absorbed the rulebook, Terra Mystica is a rather complex game – more complex than Tigris &amp; Euprates, I think, the game that in my mind sets the bar for about as complicated a game as I want to have to explain from scratch. Terra Mystica has a lot of moving parts – cult tracks, magic bowls, buildings, towns, fortresses, favors, priests, terraforming, and so on. If someone is sitting there explaining the game to you, it is not immediately apparent why this sucker needs to be as complicated as it is. Plus, then, everyone gets their own race with their own properties and customized player mat, and at this point your head possibly explodes. Good luck if your game explainer is not particularly deft.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">On an absolute scale, of course, Terra Mystica isn't that bad. I play ASL, after all. But Terra Mystica is an abstract eurogame. When you look at it from the perspective of sitting down to play one session, as a design it seems to really only have two thematic elements: managing a diverse economy (the 5 different building types do different things and have different building/upgrade costs and produce different combinations of resources), and managing the cooperative/competitive tension of wanting to have neighbors (because&nbsp;it helps you generate magic, useful for a wide variety of purposes) and yet not be constrained or cut off by them (because you are managing an expanding settlement). Really, that's about it. There are of course intricate details to all this, but in most cases they look like VP-optimizing puzzles rather than expressive game systems.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Anyway, that was my impression on first playing it, and the net effect wasn't particularly positive. It just felt overwrought. However, my opinion of the game improved when I understood Terra Mystica isn't really a game best judged on one playing. As I mentioned, Terra Mystica has many – 14 – different playable factions. These are not slightly different player positions. They are <i>very</i>&nbsp;different, more&nbsp;divergent&nbsp;even than the alien species in Eclipse, and this is why the game is as complex as it it is. Without that level of inherent system complexity, it's hard to imagine how you could cleanly support such a wide array of different factions. In&nbsp;fact, Terra Mystica accomplishes its impressive diversity generally by efficiently parameterizing the game's various systems, not through special rules. As a way to go, this is a pretty good one.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For me, this is where Terra Mystica&nbsp;succeeds: in providing a rich exploration experience. Every time you sit down to play a new faction, it's a different game and a different set of challenges. The Swarm and the Witches and the Engineers all play very differently and exploring these different points of view can be powerfully engaging. Eclipse and Terra Mystica are similar designs in many ways (even if the end effects of those design techniques are quite different), and this is one area in which I think Terra Mystica does better.&nbsp;</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">However, embracing this extremely high degree of asymmetry implies trade-offs. Terra Mystica tries for&nbsp;replayability&nbsp;and variety solely through the different factions and their interactions. Otherwise, there is no luck too the game, no hidden information, nothing that is not on the table before turn 1. Even your faction is not assigned randomly, but chosen in player order (although random allocation house rules seem not uncommon). While some will see this lack of any variability or uncertainty as a feature, it can make it very hard for a game to retain interest in even the medium-term as gameplay can very quickly stereotype absent countervailing forces. As great a game as it is, 1830 is dead to me now because the game space has been mined out.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One question then becomes, how much player interaction is there in Terra Mystica, really? Can the very different factions produce variability through their complex interactions?&nbsp;Unfortunately, I think the answer is: not to the degree it needs to. The board is a field of hexagons in 7 different colors, each&nbsp;corresponding&nbsp;to two factions, only one of which can be in play. As players' empires expand on the board, they are limited to developing on hexes of their color. Developing on other color hexes requires a process of terraforming, initially quite expensive although probably getting cheaper as the game goes on. So during the vital first half of the game, there really isn't much competition for space. Competition could theoretically get tighter as the game goes on, but in practice factions seem to develop enough tools to go around and real resource or space&nbsp;competition&nbsp;seems fairly infrequent.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So player interaction seems fairly light (and if you think about it, that makes sense – to properly ensure some sort of balance between 14 very different factions and all their potential interactions might require a vast investment in development). &nbsp;So you're left with a faction with a specific set of parameters set in an environment locked down before turn 1 and limited player interaction. That means there is an ideal way to play that faction, more or less. You just have to figure out what it is. In a game lacking any randomness and not inordinately complex, at least the broad outlines of that perfect plan should not be too elusive.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is not necessarily a problem in the short term, when finding those plans amongst the intricacy of the game systems can be engaging, but at the end of the day it means that Terra Mystica can only be a game of learning the right general techniques for each faction and then squeezing out fairly small&nbsp;efficiencies in the margins. It reminds me of the things I didn't like about War of the Ring or Through the Ages: for various different reasons, there is really only one viable way to approach both games, and you win or lose not on strategy or tactics or evaluation, but on ruthlessly going after every small advantage you can find on the way to that strategy. Fortunately for Terra Mystica, instead of one way to go, there are 14 different ones, which will take a while to figure out and significantly extend the period of discovery.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It should also be mentioned that because learning the game's tricks is so important, and because it's pretty complicated, Terra Mystica is extremely punishing of experiences differences. People who have played only a few times will have no chance against more experienced players, to an unfortunate degree. Race for the Galaxy and&nbsp;1830 are other examples of this sort of game, but my feeling is Terra Mystica is much more punishing and less fun for new players to play with veterans even than those games.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">People who have played Terra Mystica will note that I've glossed over a few things in this analysis which might appear to be mitigating. For example, on each of the 6 turns, there are point bonuses available for different game actions (building dwellings, trading posts, terraforming, founding towns, and so on). These are randomly assigned before play, making the game's initial state somewhat variable, and so could theoretically encourage different game rhythms. If the bonus for building fortresses is on turn 2, you might want to change your plan to put off building it until then and build your dwellings on turn 1. In practice, it seems different factions have different imperatives. The Giants, for example, are in a hard spot until they build their fortress and they probably need to slap it down as quickly as possible regardless. So rather than giving the game variability, the different bonuses seem instead just to give bonuses or penalties to different factions, which complicates the evaluation of which faction to pick. Once the play gets started, the factions have to do what they have to do and having to bend to&nbsp;accommodate&nbsp;different turn-to-turn bonuses just makes their job harder.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">All this may sound like I don't like Terra Mystica, but that's not true. I think it's more accurate to say I do enjoy it for what it does well, but even now, after only a handful of plays, the obvious limitations of the design are closing in. I enjoy the game when sitting down to play a new faction that I haven't played before, and building the right economic base and evolving it as the game goes on is an engaging little challenge. In the short term, while the experience of the game is biased towards system exploration, there is a lot for me to like. As the balance tips away from exploration towards rote execution, I know it's going to be far less appealing. I'm still a ways away from the point where the game becomes tedious, but I can see it pretty clearly from where I am.</span></div>Chris Farrellhttps://plus.google.com/107526139736953433093noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-914191259119493058.post-2571922415270743002013-07-04T15:18:00.000-07:002013-07-04T15:18:14.879-07:00Keyflower<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Keyflower is a game, that much I can say for sure. I think the idea of it – not that you will see it explained anywhere – is that we are leaving the Europe-ish environs of previous installments in the Key-games to found colonies in a New England-ish place. Immigrant workers arrive at our colonies to build buildings, harvest resources, and generally earn victory points. Or something. The advertising copy doesn't do a lot to explain what's going on.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Like previous games in the brand, the game is found not in the setting, but in the mechanical details. Keyflower is worker placement game, but with enough variation on this well-worn theme to be novel. Workers come in four colors or suits. You are given 8 random (hidden) workers at start, and will earn more (probably many more) over the course of the game in various ways. Each turn, you allocate small groups of workers (usually 1-3) to either bid to acquire new buildings, or to do work in existing buildings. Buildings in all the players' colonies can be used by everyone, but workers used to activate a building are kept by the building's owner. The key detail of worker allocation is that once a certain color of worker is committed to a building, either for activation or bidding, all following workers (used to either overbid or activate again) must be of the same color.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As a worker placement game, the major trade-off in Keyflower is usually the traditional one: how "hot" various available actions are and therefore what needs to be done now vs. what can be put off. The color rule adds a neat twist though. Instead of "hotness" being evaluated strictly by looking at a given action from the point of view of every other player at the table, shortages or surpluses of colors in the players' hidden inventories can make a very significant difference. For example: if there is action I really need to take that is only available on only one spot – say spending a skill tile to get some gold – and I have no red workers, I can get totally locked out if another player goes there first and uses red. Since a building can be activated up to three times, it may be a lot less hot if I only need to activate it once and have a good range of colors and can jump in even if someone gets there ahead of me, freeing me up to take something else I need that will be more competitive. Similar complications are added to the bidding for acquiring buildings, as you likely have different capabilities to bid in different colors and at different times during the game you may have different needs for long suits of workers (to activate crucial buildings multiple times) vs. worker color variety (to give you flexibility).</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Additionally, the fourth color of workers, green, is comparatively rare and can be acquired only through buildings. They are powerful due to their scarcity and therefore their ability to lock out other players. Unlike the standard three colors (yellow, red, and blue), which players will have quite a few of and will be cycling all the time, the comings and goings of green workers are rare and easier to track, which can be a powerful deterrent – everyone's a bit worried about where you're going to drop them until they finally hit the table.</span><br /><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The game goes through 4 scripted "seasons", with new buildings becoming available for bid each turn. Spring is heavy on infrastructure buildings, with point-bearing buildings mixing in with greater frequency as winter comes on. For the final winter turn, we get a selection of "6-buildings", buildings that give you big point bonuses for stuff you've done the rest of the game. You'll be dealt some number of these at the beginning of the game, and before the last turn you throw some or all of them into the mix. So you may have some idea what will be worth points in the end, but you still have to win the auction to actually get the building, and as only a random subset of the buildings will be available each game (at least with fewer than 6 players), not all strategic paths may be viable. Like Puerto Rico, I think Keyflower is a tactical game that taunts you with strategies.</span><br /><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">From a technical standpoint, probably the most daunting thing about Keyflower is easily accessing the large amount of game-state information you need to make decisions. With 2-3 buildings per player coming into the game each turn, all of which can be activated by anyone, and some of which are going to end pretty far away from you on the table, there are a lot of options and not all of them are going to be easy to see. The graphic design on Keyflower is actually very nice, with game-relevant information clearly and cleanly presented. The problem is just that a lot of it is too far away.</span><br /><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When I first played Keyflower, I liked it. The different colors of workers, with each player playing from a hidden supply, neatly mixes up the worker placement genre in a way which I liked. It makes the evaluation process a little more about what is crucial to me, and less about what is crucial to everyone else, which I think is a good thing – it makes the game more intuitive and more personal. It also adds an element of risk analysis which I personally find more entertaining than scenario analysis. It's also got a nice empire-building flavor, gathering resources to build and upgrade things.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The more I played it, though, the more its grip on me faded. It's undeniably mechanically tight. It just doesn't seem to be in service of anything. I mean, what's the game about?&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The copy text offers no background information, only a mechanical summary, and the traditional introductory setting text in the rules is absent</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">.</span><br /><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is fine, but these little "fluff" bits can offer a glimpse into the designer's mind, what he or she is trying to do with the game, and can assist the player in understanding and appreciating it – especially when there is a lot of system complexity, as there is here. If you read the copy text on the back of Agricola or GIPF, it gives you some idea of the central idea or theme of the game (food management in the case of Agricola; creating sets of 4 in a row in the case of GIPF).</span><br /><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If Keyflower has a central idea or theme, I could not find it. As I played more I was trying to figure out why the game was moving from season to season or what the these little wooden pieces wanted out of their imaginary existence, or what the game systems wanted me to be doing with them. Basically, why I should care whether an action gave me slightly fewer or slightly more VPs.</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;I couldn't do it. There was no feeling of direction, motivation, or consequence to anything in the game.</span><br /><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I still think Keyflower is OK, just because it is undeniably clever, and will certainly find a niche for players for whom the mechanical details of a game are enough. That just isn't me anymore.</span>Chris Farrellhttps://plus.google.com/107526139736953433093noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-914191259119493058.post-62475408108740164692013-05-06T22:48:00.005-07:002013-05-06T23:34:42.516-07:00Copycat<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Friedmann Friese's Copycat was my favorite game coming out of BGG.con 2012, and I picked it up at our local game shop as soon as it came out. It's a very clean, elegant design with a lot of variety. The game premise, ostentatiously ripping off the mechanics associated with top-rated games and repurposing them into something new, was designed to appeal to me – I've always said it's not mechanics that matter, but how those mechanics are assembled, calibrated, weighted, and balanced to create an effect. Copycat presents us with nothing new mechanically, but the way the different pieces are blended is quite skillful. Unless you're an insider, you can easily miss all the cameos and inside jokes but still enjoy the game.<br /><br />Sadly, like many Friese games, Copycat didn't quite make it. The obvious reason seems to be a simple one of game balance: the game's action cards&nbsp;that&nbsp;let you draw more cards seem too powerful, especially the Sauna with Colleagues and State Dinner. As long as each player gets a share of the available versions of them, it's not too bad, but if through luck, skill, or opponent's negligence&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">one player</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;manages to dominate this&nbsp;category,&nbsp;they will tediously roll to victory. It's not a complete deal-breaker, but Copycat isn't short and once you figure this out it's not great.<br /><br />I think Copycat has a more fundamental problem though. At its heart are two mechanical bits: deck-building (from Dominion) and worker placement (from Agricola). Deck-building is something I tend to like, and many of my favorite recent games use the idea (Thunderstone, Ascension, Nightfall, Trains, Core Worlds), and I tend to enjoy even the more workmanlike games in the genre (Arctic Scavengers, the various Cryptozoic games, Dominion*). Worker placement, on the other hand, is one of my most-disliked mechanics and I can count only a handful of games over its entire 10+ year history that I find consistently entertaining: Pillars of the Earth, Lords of Waterdeep, Tribune, Agricola.<br /><br />I think these two ideas are working at cross-purposes in Copycat. Deck-building games generally want to be short: early game decisions tend to weigh heavily, and as advantages quickly accrue you want to end the game before it gets tedious. Nobody's going to stage a late-game comeback off an inefficient deck built in the first half. By contrast, worker placement games tend to run long. There is a lot of downtime inherent in the system as choices have to be constantly re-evaluated and it's hard to plan ahead. Where worker placement games want to be incremental with lots of similar choices that&nbsp;evolve over time, deck builders want decisive choices which can play out relatively&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">quickly</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">. Worker placement games tend to need lots of open information to work. Deck-builders by their very physical nature hide a great deal. Worker placement games tend to be chess-like evaluation games, while deck-builders are games of probability and statistics.<br /><br />It seems to me that Copycat gets caught in-between. It's a quick deck-builder bolted to a slow, contemplative worker-placement, so it ends up taking 90 minutes and being decided by the decisions made in the first half. It's a game that requires analytical look-ahead while hiding too much information.</span><br /><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So perhaps it's not surprising that the powerful strategy that breaks Copycat is the one that short-circuits the deck-building: you want to remove the statistical element by aiming to draw your entire deck every turn. Then you can play a pure worker placement game and not worry about the vagaries that make deck-building interesting.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Copycat may still find life for me as a 2-player game, which we've tried and enjoyed – the balance seems better and it's much harder for one player to get the run of the card-drawing cards. The problem with this is that the space for longer two-player games is pretty tough, and I'm not sure what Copycat adds that I'm not getting from Ascension, Ora et Labora, Agricola, Catan Card Game, and so on.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Still, I enjoyed the exploring the space of the game, and it's a clever idea. Fun while it lasted.<br /><br />---<br /><br />* I realize putting the Spiel des Jahre-winning Dominion in the "workmanlike" category may seem a little unfair. You have to give Donald X. Vaccarino credit for coming up with a great idea that seems an obvious extension of the collectible card game concept only in retrospect. But just as the great mechanical ideas in We The People would have to wait for Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage before truly delivering on their promise, to me Dominion wasn't a complete package – it was "just" a very good pure game mechanic. </span></div>Chris Farrellhttps://plus.google.com/107526139736953433093noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-914191259119493058.post-16289910566430137872013-04-24T09:43:00.000-07:002013-04-24T09:43:30.274-07:00Göthe takes on The Virgin Queen<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Despite having turned on Here I Stand after a handful of games, I picked up The Virgin Queen at GMT West last year – lured perhaps by the lower turn count, the more open game situation, the promise of more reasonable rules for playing with fewer players, and the memory that I did enjoy Here I Stand for a number of games before it became tedious.</span><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What I find interesting about both games is that they seem to defy basic critical analysis <i>as games&nbsp;</i>for me. Göthe says that in a work of criticism, we should figure out what something is trying to do, whether it&nbsp;succeeded in doing it, and whether it was worth doing. That first question is where The Virgin Queen mystifies me.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">OK, we know that it's trying to portray the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. But that's too broad to be helpful. What is the game trying to say? And how, exactly, is it trying to say it?</span></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's clearly not going the abstract, high-level route favored by many successful thematic games: Beowulf, Settlers, Lord of the Rings, Pandemic, Modern Art, Sekigahara, Napoleon's Triumph, Rommel in the Desert, or perhaps Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage, just to pick a few. These games try to focus on just one or at most a few really essential things about the topic (Bowen Simmons used the term&nbsp;<a href="http://www.simmonsgames.com/products/Gettysburg/diary/Entry20August2009.html">quiddity</a>) and use that as the&nbsp;cornerstone of the design. Clearly, limiting scope is a foreign concept to The Virgin Queen, and the many and varied subsystems (mini-games, almost) are given fairly equal design weight.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Another design option is to focus on the decision making of the historical parties and try to convey the forces that pressed on them. This is the method Mark Herman called out in the designer's notes for For the People, and while I don't think it was particularly successful there, a great example of a game system where it works is the Great Campaigns of the American Civil War series (the most recent, in-print installment being Battle Above the Clouds). While Battle Above the Clouds' game systems are inherently abstract, with dice rolls controlling movement and initiative even though historical commanders knew quite well how far a division could march in a day, it masterfully conveys the confusion, uncertainty, and murk those commanders faced in a way that remains fun to play and recreates the historical press-your-luck decision making pressures. Another classic game in this mold is Up Front, and Labyrinth might be trying to go this route also. Clearly this is also not the approach The Virgin Queen is taking. The trade-offs made by players in The Virgin Queen are fundamentally arbitrary – Elizabeth I didn't have some spreadsheet in which she allocated some of her budget to Shakespeare, some of it to New World&nbsp;piracy, and some of it to whacking Catholics. She certainly never thought, "hey, if I can avoid getting married ever, I'll earn a bunch of VP!". I've never been able to get my head around how the cards in The Virgin Queen (or The Napoleonic Wars) are supposed to be driving authentic, or even interesting, decision-making pressures.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Another way you can go is to be representational. The idea here is to present a playing field that is as rich a simulation as is possible or reasonable as constrained by the game's complexity targets, then throw out the historical personalities and let the players step into their place. Obviously, a key here is being able to blend sensible abstraction of key elements and knowing when simulation detail is useful in either producing interesting and evocative decisions or eliciting emotional response, but the idea of authentically portraying processes is key. Vance von Borries is a master of this sort of design, and&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mark Simonitch's '4X games are great examples of games that both focus in on critical factors, abstracting the rest, while also having just the right amount of simulation detail.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Other great examples to my mind include</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;Europe and Asia Engulfed, EastFront and Downtown. This is an approach in which the key difficulty is knowing how much complexity is sensible, something about which reasonable people can disagree. Regardless, The Virgin Queen isn't doing this either. The idea that many of the game's manifold distinct and abstract subsystems – patronage, piracy, naval operations, religious conflict – are modeling historical processes is laughable.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Virgin Queen, like Here I Stand, feels very </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">similar to other "card-driven" GMT titles like Twilight Struggle, Paths of Glory, Barbarossa to Berlin, and The Napoleonic Wars.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">They are all resource management games where the resources being managed are abstract and not really in service of any thematic focus. The subject matter is just window dressing – sometimes rather nice window dressing, but still. These games just seem to be trying to present the players with constant tough decisions. As games, they are successful to the extent that they can do that. Paths of Glory: definitely, at least for a few games; Barbarossa to Berlin: yes, at least when the cardplay is viewed in&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">conjunction</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;with the more representational on-board tactical game; Twilight Struggle: for me, eh, not so much, although others find the decision-making more compelling; The Napoleonic Wars: no.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If this is the this way we're going to view the games, both Here I Stand and The Virgin Queen must ultimately be judged failures. They don't reliably present tough or even&nbsp;interesting&nbsp;choices once you understand the game's basic structure. And they don't deliver those choices in a timely manner.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I have more beefs than this with The Virgin Queen. The game is unstable and balance is suspect; the narrative tension is absent; it's overly complex and overly long; the design of the card deck doesn't produce useful suspense (unchanged from&nbsp;<a href="http://illuminatinggames.blogspot.com/2012/05/here-i-stand-and-hazards-of-big-decks.html">Here I Stand</a>). I could enumerate and detail these and other mechanical problems. At the end of day, though, the game simply lacks a coherent thematic focus and so it lives and dies on its ability to rapidly present the players with tense decisions. Which for me, it doesn't do.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Is this sort of thing really worth doing, especially in the space of very long, very complex games? To me, not especially. For one, getting the balance right – delivering these constant, difficult decisions to the players – is technically challenging even in a short game and gets dramatically more difficult to the point of practical&nbsp;impossibility&nbsp;as you add length, rules, and scope. For another, this is a very well-mined field. Games that deliver tough choices without much thematic payload are a dime a dozen.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'm aware that lots of people are rather fond of both games, and even think of them as highly thematic, so I have to ask myself: maybe there is something else going on? Obviously, they find something there that I don't, and it's pretty unlikely that they are just wrong. I think that The Virgin Queen and Here I Stand succeed for some players for exactly the same reasons that an entirely different set of players are drawn to Arkham Horror: the players bring the fun to the table themselves, and use the game only as a touchstone. The period of Martin Luther and Elizabeth I is endlessly fascinating and a lot of history geeks know a little to a lot about it, and The Virgin Queen serves up&nbsp;nerdtropes&nbsp;for the knowledgable player to riff on.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's a vehicle for players to share a historical experience, which is fine, but it's not really a game in the sense that I understand games.</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;Even by these standards I think The Virgin Queen experience doesn't really work for the same reasons Arkham Horror doesn't really work – the historical tidbits it serves up are infrequent and structurally incoherent – but hey, if you want to have some Reformation-period fun and wear an Elizabeth I nametag, there isn't much else available.</span></div>Chris Farrellhttps://plus.google.com/107526139736953433093noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-914191259119493058.post-84436563587359492362013-03-09T16:22:00.000-08:002013-03-11T14:55:59.082-07:00Andean Abyss<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Volko Ruhnke's&nbsp;<a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/91080/andean-abyss">Andean Abyss</a> is the first game in GMT's <a href="http://www.gmtgames.com/c-36-coin-series.aspx">new game series</a> on counter-insurgency (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-insurgency">COIN</a>), with a game engine that could be described as a wargamicized El Grande (or perhaps El Grande meets <a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/62227/labyrinth-the-war-on-terror-2001">Labyrinth</a>). Four players fight over a Colombia ravaged by insurgency,&nbsp;drug lords,&nbsp;and paramilitaries as they try to further their own factional goals. The game takes place shortly after the events of Mark Bowden's excellent book&nbsp;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0142000957/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0142000957&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=illumigames-20">Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw</a>, when the&nbsp;<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19px;">Medellín&nbsp;</span>drug cartels&nbsp;were clipped&nbsp;in the mid-90s. One player plays the Government, and is the driving force for the game as they try to extend their writ&nbsp;throughout&nbsp;the country. The others play the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FARC">FARC</a> revolutionaries oppose them, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Self-Defense_Forces_of_Colombia">AUC</a> paramilitaries, and free agent Drug Cartels.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />This might not immediately strike you as a promising subject on which to base a game. The conflict is a nasty one of assassination, kidnapping, extortion, drug&nbsp;trafficking, and terrorism. It's still ongoing, and ideas about it are likely to be&nbsp;educated&nbsp;guesses mixed with speculation. However, counter-insurgency is a compelling general topic. The United States' most problematic foreign policy for the last half-century has been hip-deep in it, and so a game that is illustrative in even a small way could be important. Colombia, relatively unknown to the Americans that are the core market for wargames, could get less bogged down in ideology. From a purely game perspective, highly&nbsp;asymmetric&nbsp;games – where different players play with different objectives, or even different rules – are interesting and <i>highly&nbsp;</i>asymmetric games, like&nbsp;Ruhnke's previous game Labyrinth, are very unusual. For me personally, I'm always drawn to games that successfully tackle challenging themes. A game that could get you emotionally drawn in to the tragedy of Colombia's wars would be incredibly compelling.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The play of Andean Abyss is driven by a deck of event cards. Each card has an ordering for the icons for the four factions (Government, FARC, AUC, Cartels) across the top, which is the turn order for this card. Two cards will always be visible, this turn's and the next's. Each faction in turn has the opportunity to do something – take the event, run one or many operations – or pass. Only two factions can be active on each card, and whatever the first faction does generally forces the second faction into a more restrictive action (so if the first faction does an operation, the second faction will have a limited operation). Additionally, taking an action this turn forces a faction to sit out next turn, so a cycle tends to develop, with two pairs of factions alternating cards. However, being the first faction to act usually means significantly more flexibility than going second, so it's important to know when to pass because the turn order on the next card up is favorable and giving up an opportunity to act now will give you more freedom later.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />Once you've decided to take an operation, your options are given by a faction-specific Chinese menu of thematically named actions: march, recruit, train, attack, assassinate, extort, airstrike, cultivate, terror, and so on. Each faction has troops (cubes for the government,&nbsp;cylinders for the insurgents/guerrillas) which fight for the control of areas, and bases (discs) which provide both the economic backing to fund operations and places to recruit. Control is described on two axes (population in an area can support the&nbsp;government&nbsp;or oppose it, while the area can be&nbsp;physically&nbsp;controlled by one of the factions), and there are different types of areas (regions, cities, lines of communication) with different economic and population-control&nbsp;implications. The Government has a lengthy process to go through of cycling in army, then police cubes in an abstraction of building up civic infrastructure while other factions try to keep their power bases and forces in being and remain flexible. While there is a significant amount of real nuance here, to me it felt like just a really complicated and asymmetric&nbsp;variant of El Grande. You need your cubes in the right place and in sufficient quantity to control areas. If they're out of position you need to move them. If you don't have enough pieces on the board, you need to get more out. If you're short money to fund actions, you need to get out more bases or do some extortion.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Volko Ruhnke is the designer of both Andean Abyss and Labyrinth, so it's not surprising that to the extent that both games succeed, they succeed in similar ways, and where they fail, the failings are similar also. Labyrinth may have struggled with politics, reality, and&nbsp;a wonky endgame,&nbsp;but it was remarkable for how well it allowed two very different player positions with different motivations and different tools to play the same game. Importantly, neither position or viewpoint was&nbsp;privileged&nbsp;over the other – both Jihadists and the US get the same level of thematic attention from the game. Ruhnke's older design <a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1822/wilderness-war">Wilderness War</a> tried to do something similar, but it's flaw (while, like Labyrinth, still being a game I enjoy) was that it privileged the British point of view somewhat over the French. The British concerns seemed to get more attention in&nbsp;gameplay&nbsp;detail and drove&nbsp;more of&nbsp;the action, while the French were essentially reactionary.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The factional viewpoints in Andean Abyss are somewhere in-between these two earlier games. The Government's position is thematically well-developed, with a detailed process for expanding their writ. The&nbsp;guerrilla&nbsp;factions – the FARC, AUC, and Cartels –&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">all feel pretty similar though. They all have a broadly similar range of actions available, although they&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">are playing to quite different game-state goals. Those different goals though are were I believe Andean Abyss goes off the rails.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />The first problem is the relatively straightforward nature of the AUC and Cartel victory conditions. While the Government has to go through an involved process of pacification, and the FARC is fighting a lonely and probably doomed war for control of population and regions, the AUC and Cartels need only get a fairly small number of bases on the board and (for the Cartels) accumulate a wad of cash. These relatively minor players – with few forces, no interest in controlling population, and more limited options – are compensated with easy VCs, to the point I've&nbsp;actually never seen anyone other than the Cartels or AUC win the game. Now, this is just my I experience and I don't actually believe it's the way it has to be, but it brings me to my main, crucial problem with Andean Abyss, which I could have written several paragraphs ago and saved us all a lot of trouble:</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />Andean Abyss is a game about&nbsp;counter-insurgency&nbsp;with no – none, zero, zilch –&nbsp;asymmetrical&nbsp;information. No hidden cards, no hidden units, no mysterious capabilities. Everything is on the table all the time. You know exactly how much force everyone has everywhere, you know the entirety of the options available to everyone, you know the results of any operations anyone might run. To the extent that there is randomness to the outcome of operations – which is almost none – everyone knows the probabilities. Everyone knows exactly how the the population thinks and exactly what to do to change their minds.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />This seems highly questionable from a&nbsp;thematic point of view and gives little sense of the murky nature of these conflicts. Not only that, it has manifestly&nbsp;undesirable&nbsp;consequences&nbsp;for gameplay. Instead of making quick decisions about risk, players run several degrees of chess-like move and counter-move look-ahead, because that's how the game is clearly telling them to think, and it turns what should be a 2 or 3 hour game that would be pressing its luck to go 3 hours into a tedious marathon (my games have gone 5 hours even for the short game). Even worse though, everyone can see all the time exactly who is exactly how close to winning. So it just turns into the usual exercise of bashing whoever is in front.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />I had some hopes that familiarity with the game would drive down the playing time. The menus of numerous different&nbsp;actions, apparently different for each faction (although less diverse than it first appears), is hugely daunting for new player to grapple with. Playing a 100% open information game where everyone has different actions available and trying to get some sense of the implications of what you're doing requires understanding a lot of things and constantly puzzling over options. Once you've learned this stuff, you could hope for a more streamlined experience. Unfortunately, there are two major obstacles. Firstly, few people really want to play again after the first 5+ hour slugfest. Secondly, the time you save in understanding the game is clawed back by the fact that now everybody knows everyone has to be on the lookout to block anyone who comes close to winning. So you add&nbsp;a lot of less than compelling scenario analysis and back-and-forth time back in.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />Finally, like Labyrinth before it, Andean Abyss ducks too many hard questions and instead presents us with a crisp, clean, and sanitized design of cylinders,&nbsp;cubes,&nbsp;disks, and highly predictable outcomes that does little to convey the violence and capriciousness of the conflict. Perhaps an RPG would be a better format to explore the tragedy of Colombia, but Andean Abyss could have done more just by integrating more historical photos into the map and reference cards (the photos on the cards are too small and too far away to reliably make out), and using a more naturalistic approach to the visual design.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />I really wanted to like Andean Abyss and wanted it to be a launchpad for a new and intriguing series of games. Flawed as they were,&nbsp;I am still fond of&nbsp;Labyrinth and Wilderness War.&nbsp;The game mechanics of Andean Abyss – the event cards that drive turn choices, the individualized faction action menus, the light economic model backing a positional game of discs and cubes – are promising. There is clearly a game that could have been built using them. Unfortunately, Andean Abyss is not it. Despite the undeniable level of thought and detail that has gone into it, what comes out at the end is just tedious, overlong, and overcomplicated in the same way as many other much less thoughtful king-of-the-hill type multiplayer wargames are. Unless future games address the core problem of 100% information symmetry, I don't hold out much hope the series will improve.</span>Chris Farrellhttps://plus.google.com/107526139736953433093noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-914191259119493058.post-37933213763653969292013-03-03T15:26:00.003-08:002013-03-03T18:24:30.034-08:00X-Wing Miniatures Game<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">No franchise is more beloved of gamers than Star Wars, and it's actually had a number of pretty good games. My personal favorite is&nbsp;<a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/939/star-wars-the-queens-gambit">The Queen's Gambit</a>. The two Star Wars adaptations of Risk (<a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/15045/risk-star-wars-the-clone-wars-edition">Clone Wars</a> and <a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/22551/risk-star-wars-original-trilogy-edition">Original&nbsp;Trilogy</a>) are still Risk but&nbsp;surprisingly&nbsp;good, and <a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/90/star-wars-episode-1-clash-of-the-lightsabers">Clash of the Lightsabers</a> is a nice fast 2-player game that melds euro-y mechanical tightness with a nice thematic detail. The <a href="http://www.rpggeek.com/rpg/938/star-wars-weg-2nd-edition">West End</a>&nbsp;and <a href="http://www.rpggeek.com/rpg/252/star-wars-saga">d20 Saga</a> Star Wars RPGs are decent but to me nothing special, and there are still a lot of&nbsp;mediocre games&nbsp;trying to make a quick buck off the license along with the well-intentioned but misguided (<a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3593/star-wars-star-warriors">Star Warriors</a>), but overall I can't complain.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Fantasy Flight has now thrown two new games into the ring (<a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/103885/star-wars-x-wing-miniatures-game">X-Wing</a> and <a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/103886/star-wars-the-card-game">Star Wars: The Card Game</a>), with one more (the official release of the&nbsp;<a href="http://rpggeek.com/rpg/19360/star-wars-edge-of-the-empire">Edge of the Empire</a> RPG) coming soon.</span><br /><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">X-Wing was hard for me to know what to make of initially. It's built on a very similar engine to Ares' Wings of Glory (which has mechanically similar, but quite different in feel,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/119866/wings-of-glory-ww1-rules-and-accessories-pack">WWI</a> and <a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/107148/wings-of-glory-ww2-starter-set">WWII</a> versions). Players simultaneously plot their moves ahead of time, then reveal and execute turns, loops, and whatnot and then fire their weapons. There are enough clear similarities between the games, and my respect for FFG's in-house design team is low enough, that my initial impression was "OK, they just ripped off Wings of Glory" and to proceed to apply similar heuristics for tactics and strategy. Fortunately for gamers and unfortunately&nbsp;for my pilots, it is not. In fact, in terms of where the game is – where the real decisions lie, and what the game tensions are – X-Wing is <i>very</i> distinct from its parent game.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-56TXBowuW8o/UTPHORpNI8I/AAAAAAAAATE/RjzZAhRf_7Y/s1600/IMG_0942.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-56TXBowuW8o/UTPHORpNI8I/AAAAAAAAATE/RjzZAhRf_7Y/s400/IMG_0942.JPG" width="400" /></a><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For starters, combat in X-Wing is quite lethal. An off-the-rack TIE fighter can absorb 3 points of damage before exploding in a cinematic fireball. An X-Wing with its 3 attack dice can do that outright one time in 8 – the 8-sided attack dice have hits on half the faces. If your attacker is focussed, the odds increase to almost 50%. If he's Wedge, or locked-on, or a Marksman, or at point-blank range, or all of the above, the odds – which you really need to be told about – keep on increasing. Now, the TIE Fighter is going to get some weaker evasion dice, and he may be spending effort on dodging. Nonetheless, the X-Wing in this confrontation will only need to land one or two blows to take out its target. In Wings of Glory, inflicting the 18 damage points required to take down an Me-109 is likely going to take three or more point-blank shots from a Spitfire.</span><br /><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Where Wings of Glory spends all its attention to detail on hardware differences – the different turning or speed or weapon capabilities of different aircraft – X-Wing is much more focussed on pilot capabilities. The differences in speed and maneuverability between an X-Wing and a TIE Fighter, while not zero, are pretty small compared to the differences between Luke Skywalker and a generic Red Squadron Pilot. <i>The</i>&nbsp;single most crucial performance&nbsp;asymmetry&nbsp;of real ariel warfare that is at the core of the design in both Wings of Glory games – turning radius – varies only slightly across all fighters in X-Wing. The TIE fighter may be slightly faster than the X-Wing, but at a given velocity everyone turns in the same circles, with a few differences on the edges (A-Wings and TIE Fighters have a slower minimum speed so can execute somewhat tighter circles, while Y-Wing pilots take stress for some tight turns).*,** Putting Wedge Antllies in the cockpit, on the other hand, dramatically increases the ship's lethality.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Lastly, scenarios in X-Wing don't give you an order of battle, instead they give you points (usually 100) with which to buy your forces. The number of available options for spending these points is large, assuming you've invested in a modestly-sized collection. Pilots for your fighters are the big cost, but pilots can also be given special skills (marksmanship, determination), fighters can have additional weaponry added (proton torpedoes, ion cannons, various missiles), and there are more specialized upgrades (R2 units for your X-Wings, and Slave I or the&nbsp;Millennium&nbsp;Falcon can be tricked out with half-a-dozen different options). If like me your perspective is Wings of Glory, you might think "Aha! At last, a point-buy system for getting reasonably balanced match-ups!". But that's not what this is about.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Because of the game's lethality, X-Wing is about big battles. Where in Wings of Glory you would be content with the complexity of controlling 1 or 2 planes, in X-Wing you'll want 3 or 4 or more&nbsp;fighters&nbsp;to stay interested. In Wings of Glory, you'll be primarily concerned about how to maneuver your one or two planes to improve your positional advantage on the one or two enemy planes in your vicinity. In X-Wing, you'll be concerned about how to use your entire squadron such that pilot special abilities and synergies are maximized and any special weaponry you've bought is employed to its best effect. And, crucially, you'll want to spend your 100 points such that your squadron is both tactically coherent and as potent as you can make it.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">At the end of the day, X-Wing is a deck-building game with a detailed combat resolution system. I think you will enjoy this in direct proportion to how much you enjoy tricking out your squadron and seeing how it fares in battle. The tactical game is pretty good, but a little random and not, in isolation, enough to be engaging for more than a few plays. But combine it with the fairly rich squadron purchasing system, and now you've got something. You've invested the pre-game energy in your pilots and ships and (probably) developed both a more nuanced tactical view of how it should be employed that may only play out over a few games, as well as something of an emotional attachment to your pilots.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Does all this hew to the feel of Star Wars? Yes-ish, with the caveat that like most classic books and movies, Star Wars speaks in different ways to different viewers. The emphasis on people more than machines is clearly right, although more pictures of people on the card design would have been a no-brainer (and restoring some of the&nbsp;female&nbsp;pilots&nbsp;<a href="http://www.blastr.com/2012/12/there-were-3-female-tie-f.php">cut from Return of the Jedi</a>&nbsp;would have been awesome).</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;For me personally though, X-Wing buys into one thing that has always bugged me about Star Wars material not written by George Lucas: it assumes that all the people we see on screen are more&nbsp;competent&nbsp;than everyone who doesn't get name-checked. I always thought the classic stories focussed on Luke and Han and Leia because they were interesting, not because they were the biggest bad-asses in the entire universe. Games, books, and comics frequently assign superpowers that are just not in evidence in the movies, where the humanity and relative ordinariness of the characters is such an important element. In fairness, X-Wing is far from the worst offender here, but it still bugs me a bit that Wedge Antilles has a table presence that vastly exceeds any other Red Squadron pilot. I always thought he was some guy who happened to be Luke's wingman. Both excellent pilots, but really, does the Rebel Alliance have nobody else? These personal feelings aside, X-Wing does do a good job of evoking the feel of the scenes in the movies. Action is fast and furious, combat is capricious unless you've heavily invested in an über-pilot, and the miniatures really are fantastic – very attractive and very faithful to the original models, but durable enough to stand up to the stress of play (the design of the stands themselves isn't that great, but Litko makes a nice </span><a href="http://www.litko.net/products/Space-Fighter%2C-Deluxe-Flight-Stand-%281%29.html#.UTPFaaVJ81E" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">replacement</a><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;if and when something breaks).&nbsp;</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, generally pretty appealing, but a couple obstacles remain. Firstly is the lack of decent support for multiplayer. 100 point squadrons are borderline OK, with players each taking&nbsp;control of 2-4 ships. Due to the lethality of combat though, someone is bound to have a ship or two knocked out early and face waning interest. It's not bad, but out of the box X-Wing is really optimized for two players and you'll have to make do.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Multiplayer really wants specialized scenarios with multiple squadrons on a side, with players buying their own (smaller) forces, possibly with different tasking.</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is slightly unfortunate given the possibilities and given how good Wings of Glory is for 4 or more players. (As an aside, when playing multiplayer do not neglect the very important rule that you cannot show your maneuver dials to your allies).</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Secondly, do not mistake the point values assigned to various upgrades as a reasonable&nbsp;approximations&nbsp;of their worth. Squadron building requires thought. You can't throw together 100 points of stuff and and figure it'll do OK any more than you can throw together 60 vaguely appropriate Magic cards and expect that deck to perform. There are good and bad buys in the mix, and you can build both very potent and very underpowered ships and squadrons. This is fine – part of the game even – but something casual players who enjoy Wings of Glory may find frustrating. While you won't go too far wrong fielding X-Wings, an off-the-rack Y-Wing is pretty pricey for what you get in most cases, and as such is a specialty ship. Add an Ion Cannon to it and it's a huge hole in your budget unless it's filling an important tactical need. For the Imperials, their fragile TIE fighters require attention to synergizing pilot abilities to be&nbsp;competitive – but a large, finely-tunend Imperial squadron can be a beast.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Thirdly of course is cost. As usual, Fantasy Flight has shipped a <a href="http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_minisite_sec.asp?eidm=174&amp;esem=2&amp;esum=223">core set</a>&nbsp;that is playable only in a technical sense, and is a teaser more then a satisfying game. You're going to need more ships for this to work – my feeling is at least a second core set and a few of the Wave 1 expansion blisters. With big-box games now routinely weighing in at $60 or more it's actually not too bad comparatively and you do get nicely detailed and painted ships, but it can add up. For me, the online prices were palatable, full retail not so much. Fortunately, you're also going to need multiple invested players, so there is no reason you can't pool ships in a regular gaming group.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I quite enjoyed X-Wing, although it took me a little bit to get there. As a long-time Wings of Glory player, the similarities between the games are deceptive and it took some effort to appreciate a rather different game. As an older gamer, it's filling a tricky niche though. It needs multiple players who have bought in enough to have forces available and be willing to spend the up-front time tuning their squadrons. It's not a ton of time, but it is some. It's best as a two-player game until we get some scenarios optimized for multiplayer. It's in the same general niche as Wings of Glory, but it lacks that game's accessibility&nbsp;and easy tactical richness. Having said all that, though, X-Wing is definitely not Wings of Glory, and it brings a very different, richly varied, and exciting&nbsp;experience. And honestly, who doesn't want to fly around authentic, nicely-painted X-Wing miniatures?</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">---</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* Because the TIE Fighter has the&nbsp;Barrel&nbsp;Roll action available, it can technically turn in a noticeably tighter radius than other ships. Unfortunately, since doing this costs the pilot&nbsp;his action, this comes at the expense of evading or focusing – actions crucial to keeping his fragile ship alive. So it's helpful, especially if it means dodging out of someone's firing arc at the last minute, but not a general-purpose ability. See also the following correction.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">** <i>Correction:</i>&nbsp;This sentence originally stated everyone's turn radius is the same. This is not quite true. Everyone uses the same movement templates at any given speed, but not everyone can use the shortest/tightest-radius template. The ability of TIEs and A-Wings to do very tight turns is not insignificant, but it's rather different from (say) knowing that your Spitfire can out-turn opponents at any speed, and its just not as important to the X-Wing&nbsp;design in my opinion. For a look how the different fighters move, check out <a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/filepage/88210/x-wing-maneuvres-sheet">this file</a> on BGG. Some of the distinctions seem nonsensical (why is a speed 2 sharp turn an easy maneuver for an A-Wing, while a speed 3 is not? Why can the A-Wing and TIE Interceptor do an Immelman – sorry, Koiogran – at speeds 3 and 5 but not 4?).&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Who knows.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But the system does work, and provides some maneuver differentiation without going crazy.</span>Chris Farrellhttps://plus.google.com/107526139736953433093noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-914191259119493058.post-19335244631542582452013-02-22T11:15:00.000-08:002013-02-22T12:18:50.334-08:00Ginkgopolis<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">After a bit of a drought, the last 6 months have been great for the "artful euro". I've played quite a few that have kept me coming back for more:&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Escape, Qin,</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;Il Vecchio,&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">SewerPirats,&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Nieuw Amsterdam, &nbsp;Mutant Meeples, Copycat, Panic on Wall Street (née Masters of Commerce). One of the most&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">pleasantly</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;surprising has been </span><a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/128271/ginkgopolis" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ginkgopolis</a><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">.</span><br /><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ginkgopolis</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;is one of those interesting, multifaceted games that while it's not terribly complex it defies easy pigeonholing. The conceit is that we're eco-friendly urban planners building a city by laying tiles onto a square grid, and we can&nbsp;build either outwards (urbanizing by adding tiles to the edge) or upwards (adding new floors on top of existing tiles). Where you can play is driven by your hand of 4 cards, drawn from a deck which contains all the visible buildings in the city plus 12 border spots for&nbsp;urbanization. Each turn players secretly and simultaneously play a face-down card and optionally a tile, which fully&nbsp;specifies&nbsp;their action for the turn, and then resolve in turn order.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Each action gains you resources: more tiles to play, victory points, building ownership markers, or cards to add to your tableau which may provide bonuses to future actions or endgame points.</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WXpq6WVyqSg/USfDI6a5SVI/AAAAAAAAAS0/rOVGdRQcdqI/s1600/IMG_1073.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WXpq6WVyqSg/USfDI6a5SVI/AAAAAAAAAS0/rOVGdRQcdqI/s400/IMG_1073.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There are multiple strong tensions which affect every decision you make in the game, which is what gives Ginkgopolis its immediate pull. One familiar one is the tension between building an engine, scoring points, or gaining needed resources. Whenever you Build a Floor – play a card for an existing build to put a new tile on top of it – you get to take the card you played and add it to your tableau. The card can give you bonus resources when you take one of the three categories of action in the future (Urbanization, Build a Floor, Exploitation) or endgame points, depending on the card's rank – low ranks provide powers, high ranks provide conditional victory points. The game system then makes it harder to grab those high-valued cards, because it costs points to build lower ranked floor tiles on top of a higher ranked one. The cards and tiles rank 1-20, so if you have the card for one of the starting buildings ranked 1-3 in hand you can play it along with any tile ranked 4-20 to add a floor, taking the 3 card for your tableau (it lets you draw an extra tile draw any time you add a new floor to a building). Say you play the 15 tile; the card for the 15 building will then be fished out of the reserves and added to the deck on the next cycle.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If you subsequently see the 15 card, if you want to add a floor on top of <i>it</i> and snag the 15 card for your tableau (it gives you 3 points at the end of the game for every building you own of height 3 or higher), you'll need to play a higher-value tile to do it without penalty. You can play something lower, but then you'll need to pay victory points for the difference, which can be painful in a game where victory points are relatively tight.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This leads to another of the game's key tensions: when do you play the powerful, high-ranking tiles? If you have a 20 tile you can use it to add a floor to anything without penalty, so you want to use it to grab a cool, high-valued card. But opportunities are made available by the random flow of cards and tiles, so are hard to predict. As the ranks go down (what about an 18? a 16?), it becomes trickier. You need to get something, you can't sit on tiles or any other kinds of resources forever without using them, and the perfect play is elusive.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For those big tiles, the ideal play may not necessarily involve snagging a good end-of-game scoring card. There are also big points at stake for controlling districts, groups of adjacent like-colored buildings. Getting high-valued tiles onto the board may be valuable for creating or joining up districts, or making them more painful to break up (because they are harder to build over).</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">While the Building a Floor move is the flashiest and most novel mechanic in the game, the other actions are just as important. Urbanization involves playing a letter card which matches an outside point on the city along with a tile, and it expands the playing field. While it doesn't allow you to add power cards to your tableau, it does score you resources (tiles, points, or ownership markers) to fuel your continuing growth, which Building a Floor does not by default.&nbsp;Exploitation&nbsp;allows you to play a card alone for some resources. All the actions can be buffed by cards in your tableau. In a recent game, one player built an&nbsp;Exploitation&nbsp;engine which turned what is superficially&nbsp;<i>seems</i>&nbsp;like the weakest action (it's really not, because unlike the other actions it doesn't require a tile to power) into such a strong victory point generator he could use it to clobber us.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Crucially, Exploitation allows you to bury high-valued cards when you can't economically grab them because you don't have a good tile. After your turn is over, you're going to pass the rest of your hand to the left, meaning they get a good crack at any cool cards you didn't use.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I think one of the reasons people have found Ginkgopolis appealing is the remarkable elegance with which the game systems blend. For a game with 60 tiles (1-20 in three suits), 60 matching cards, 12 border tiles and cards, and three different actions types (Urbanization, Exploitation, and Building a floor), there is a lot going on here and there is real design elegance. While it will be baffling for a turn or two because it is basically abstract, once it clicks it really clicks. Players will ask rules questions ("what happens if I add a floor to a building that has already had a floor added this cycle?" "what happens if I have a card I can't play?") and I usually tell them to think about it for a second, and it becomes clear that these tricky situations simply can't occur – my preferred way for handling them. Everything in the game seems to work the way it does because that's the way it needs to work.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Thematically, Ginkgopolis is nominally about building cities in harmony with nature in a post-resource-exhaustion future, but it's mostly theme through nice art. This is not a terrible way to go, has worked before, and I think it works here. The nod to the unusual and distinctive&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginkgo">ginkgo</a> tree, a living fossil, is a nice touch and is effectively used in the art design. It's not a lot – the tensions in the game don't particularly make me think of urban planning – but you can't have everything all the time.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's because of this relative thematic abstractness that I wasn't sure how well Ginkgopolis would go over with my friends. It's been a pleasant surprise how well everyone has liked it, even those normally skeptical of lightly-themed abstracts.</span></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">While I think Ginkopolis doesn't quite fall into the same general box as the true classic eurogames (El Grande, Modern Art, Settlers) because of this relative abstractness combined with not immediately intuitive mechanics, this is still an old-school meaty euro in all the best senses of all those words. Streamlined systems, crisp gameplay, lots of tension, chaotic enough to provide replayability and ever-changing problems, and an elegance of design all point towards this have real staying power amongst hobbyist gamers.</span></div>Chris Farrellhttps://plus.google.com/107526139736953433093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-914191259119493058.post-31227167230496983272013-01-02T10:00:00.001-08:002013-01-02T10:04:26.955-08:00The One Ring RPG<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I threw in the towel on D&amp;D (3, 3.5 and 4, plus Pathfinder) a couple years ago and switched my roleplaying energies to Gumshoe, a decision I'm quite happy with. But, as is usual with these things, I didn't bring along all the friends I game with. For players who like the tactical combat, detailed character building, and the die-rolling of D&amp;D or Pathfinder, Gumshoe is not going to be in their wheelhouse.</span><br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.cubicle7.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/TOR_slipcase_contents.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="265" src="http://www.cubicle7.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/TOR_slipcase_contents.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The One Ring RPG, from Cubicle 7</td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So I'm always on the lookout for somewhere we can meet in the middle. A game, probably a fantasy game, that has interesting combat with plenty of die-rolling but doesn't get bogged down in minutia and can be enjoyed more in the quick-playing, systems-light style. Something that has plenty of skills and feat-like-things, but that still taps into the more improvisational RPG aesthetic.<a href="http://www.cubicle7.co.uk/our-games/the-one-ring/"> The One Ring</a> looked perfect.</span><br /><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br /><div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Not that I came to that conclusion right away though. I picked it up after it got some buzz from GenCon 2011 despite the fact that </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Tolkien roleplaying games in general have a rather sorry history</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, mainly because of my Tolkien fandom and because it was through Sophisticated Games, which has a good track record with licensed products. Unfortunately, The One Ring's two core books are incoherent: rules presented in almost random order, topics split between sections and between both books and fully explained nowhere, paragraphs that give up their meaning only after intense textual analysis – it's really terrible. After doing my initial read I shelved it feeling like it was making the right noises, but having little idea what the game was trying to do. It was only once I picked it up again six months later and plowed through it on a mission that I figured out what the game was about.</span></span></div><br /><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's a nice blend of ideas. The skill check system is straightforward: you roll against target numbers with a single d12 Fate die, plus one regular d6 for each rank you have in the skill. There are a few nuances built in to the custom dice: the d6s have a Tengwar rune for an exceptional success on the 6, and the 1-3 faces are shaded and count for zero if you are weary. The big variance on the Fate die makes it possible for more or less anyone to succeed (albeit rarely) at many things, but it takes skill to get the exceptional successes that trigger bonuses. The probability curve is rather nice and gives you real flexibility as the GM with target numbers; there are big differences between how characters with various ranks in skills will feel about targets of 10, 12, 14, or 16. The rules for Weariness, zeroing out your d6 rolls of 1 through 3, are very clean but impactful, and make tasks a lot harder but don't make impossible anything you could accomplish when well-rested.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This solid skill check system then works quite well in combat, which is abstract but has good texture. Each combat round you choose how closely you are going to engage, which affects both how easy it will be for you to hit the enemy as well as how easily they hit you. Each range bracket has a special action associated with it (intimidate, rally, protect, aim), and there are other standard combat options (called shots, accepting knockback) which provide some choices and are thematic. Additionally, it's nice to see attention to workable rules for disengaging and fleeing from combat, a common occurrence in the books. Also nice is that enemies have a Hate rating which both powers their special abilities and is a proxy for morale, giving the GM an explicit cue for when the bad guys break and run away themselves. Still, despite the solid mechanical support here, combat is still pretty abstract and nowhere near as tactically detailed as many would probably like. Gumshoe has always relied on the players to be a little more imaginative than just saying "I shoot him. I'll spend 2 shooting points. <rolls 2="2" a="a"> I hit. <rolls 4="4" a="a"> I do 6 points of damage". You don't need involved narration for every combat roll, but it's in the hands of the players to bring the action to life. The One Ring gives players much more support than Gumshoe does in terms of structure to hang some narration on, but it will still get repetitive and feel</rolls></rolls></span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> flat unless players can engage with it and flesh it out through colorful description.</span><br /><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is all good and well-designed, but where does the players' real narrative authority kick in? Characters in The One Ring have Traits (which can be Specialties, which are like backgrounds, or Distinctive Features, which are more like personality traits), which serve some of the same game functions as FATE's Aspects or Gumshoe's investigative skills. They are little bits of description that if you can integrate in to what you're trying to accomplish with a skill, you get a significant bonus – sometimes an auto-success, sometimes an extra experience point. There is no token economy backing this up as in FATE – you can earn the bonus as often as you can do it – and neither is as integral to the system as Trail of Cthulhu's Drives which have a hard link to a character's Sanity. It's more akin to the Technothriller Monologue and similar cherries in <a href="http://rpggeek.com/rpgitem/129481/nights-black-agents">Night's Black Agents</a>. Give a little narration that invokes your trait and pleases the GM and the other players, and you get a bonus. My only complaint is that I think a number of The One Ring's pre-packaged Traits can be problematic. Some of them are just hard to work into adventuring sorts of actions without straining something (Fishing?). Others, while perhaps thematic, are problematic from a game perspective as they can feed bad group dynamics (Secretive, Suspicious, or Wilful will be grabbed immediately by your player who enjoys hosing the party or abusing the gaming social contract).</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In practice, while </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Traits are simple,</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> work, and I like them, nonetheless they didn't exert much pull on the imaginations of my fellow-players. Perhaps the off-the-shelf ones were too vague and not generally useful enough, or the benefits of using them are not as crisp and clear as FATE's Fate points. I suspect a combination. If you have a group that likes and has some experience with these sorts of player narrative hooks I'm sure it'll be fine, but I suspect for groups trying to make the switch form D&amp;D, GURPS, or Call of Cthulhu there might not be enough direction here.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">More practical and useful I think are a few conventions and pointers for GMs. One key bit is that skill checks are resolved in a somewhat non-traditional way: first, as a player state what you are trying to accomplish; second, roll the dice; and finally, narrate your character's actions and the outcome, maybe with the help of the GM. This is a simple thing but makes for a much more satisfactory narrative, especially for social skills. How often have you framed, say, a Diplomacy check by narrating a suave approach and a persuasive argument only to fumble the die roll? It becomes hard to climb down at that point and narrate an interesting and plausible failure. This is a good habit to get into with any game I think, but The One Ring's easy skill check details for extraordinary successes and fumbles supports it especially well. It also allows the characters more narrative control over both how they succeed and how they fail, which can be fun. Watch out though for the players who are too possessive and have a hard time narrating failure for their characters, instead trying to twist a failed die roll into an uncomplicated narrative success, but I suspect we can agree not to blame the system for that.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Beyond these core ideas, The One Ring provides a lot of mechanical support for </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">adventuring in Tolkien's world. There is a nice journeying sub-game for long trips which folds into the weariness system and provides a good way to hook in "random" encounters along the way when players blow rolls. Hope gives a way for characters to boost rolls, but spend too much Hope and you may gain a </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Shadow-Weaknesses, a Trait that works more to your disadvantage. The mix of wounds, weariness, and loss of hope inflicted by combat is much more thematic and interesting than just tracking hit points. The advancement system is point-buy, but the way experience points are awarded is quite clever – you get them for skill checks, but you can't rack them up for using a single strong skill, you need to use a range of skills of different types. W</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">hile the game is definitely what I'd consider lightweight, there is some detail to it. Unfortunately, I have to come back to the wretched books which make the game seem far more complicated than it really is. The first time we played, we were frequently flipping pages (and thrashing with the useless index) to find simple concepts. I ended up having to read both books cover to cover a third time, taking notes, to build up a reference card with a summary of all the systems just to make the game playable. It was only one page front and back in a large-ish font – this is a simple game with a truly terrible ruleset.</span><br /><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The last thing to talk about is the inherent difficulty associated with gaming in the worlds of J R R Tolkien. I think The One Ring has done a good job in hewing to the feel of the books,</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> and </span><span style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I think </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">focusing on the period and style of The Hobbit more than The Lord of the Rings is the right choice. The Hobbit makes more fertile ground for lighter, fun, action-adventure games, while The Lord of the Rings is complicated by its truly epic scale and the </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">fact that anything you might do is vastly less important than whatever the Fellowship is up to. Still, even focusing on The Hobbit, the problem is that like the Cthulhu Mythos every reader finds something different in Tolkien and decades of bad knock-offs have polluted the environment, so it can be hard for everyone to be on the same page style-wise. How many battles do the heroes of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings actually initiate? None as far as I can remember – they're all defensive engagements, or running battles with the heroes trying to escape. But a million D&amp;D set-pieces where dwarves and elves and men take the battle to the bad guys (and loot their stuff) makes balancing expectations complicated. </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I really enjoy reading the parts of the <a href="http://rpggeek.com/rpgitem/97571/ashen-stars">Ashen Stars</a> and Night's Black Agents rules where Robin Laws and Kenneth Hite talk quite specifically about how stories are structured in their game worlds, what the themes are and how to keep the characters moving. Something along these lines for The One Ring would have been hugely helpful, as the modules provided in the rulebook and the Tales from Wilderland sourcebook are mediocre. Tolkien is not about escorting hapless two-bit merchants through Mirkwood for a flat fee. Perhaps an </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">equivalent</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> of the Cthulhu Mythos' "</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">purist</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">" vs. "</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">pulp</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> would be helpful here.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Bottom line for me: as a person intrigued by game systems and how they </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">tweak players and </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">enable different play styles, I liked The One Ring a lot and it overcame my inherent skepticism about the gameability of Tolkien. The dice system is </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">terrific</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, the combat system is light-ish but thematic and interesting and with some subtlety, and the game is faithful to the books. Unfortunately the supports for the good game mechanics are not very good. The books are atrociously put together. The adventures are at best OK. The vital Traits are a mixed bag. There is little help for the GM in terms of the nitty-gritty of designing adventures, and crucially little practical guidance on the complicated questions of style and how to game Tolkien in a way that's fun. As good as the game system is, and as I much as I hope The One Ring can find a niche in my roleplaying rotation, these practical obstacles are significant and I fear I need to keep looking for something reliable to fill the gap between D&amp;D and Gumshoe. Maybe <a href="http://rpggeek.com/rpg/17925/13th-age">13th Age</a> will fill the bill.</span>Chris Farrellhttps://plus.google.com/107526139736953433093noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-914191259119493058.post-42854305661937794892012-12-29T19:03:00.000-08:002012-12-29T23:59:24.000-08:00Pax Porfiriana<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sierra Madre has continued on its recent roll for me. I was torn on <a href="http://illuminatinggames.blogspot.com/2009/03/origins-how-we-became-human.html">Origins: How We Became Human</a>, and didn't really like anything before that, but I have enjoyed High Frontier, Bios: Megafauna, and Pax Porfiriana a great deal, all for similar reasons but all in their own quite distinct ways.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What all the games share is a deeply-researched setting. You have always had to approach Sierra Madre Games with a somewhat different aesthetic sense than other games. You can't go into it thinking primarily about game mechanisms, or how you can work the interacting game systems, or even how you are going to use the game systems to win. You need to think first about&nbsp;figuring&nbsp;out what the game is trying to say: in the case of Pax Porfiriana, it's covering and commenting on the chaotic period before the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Revolution">Mexican Revolution</a> in 1910. This is not to say that the game systems are unimportant, or that you should not be trying to win. It's just to say that you will grasp the game more fundamentally and appreciate it more if you think of it as being about a power struggle between four factions in an unstable Mexico on the brink of dramatic change, change that you are trying to navigate your way through, rather than as a collection of&nbsp;game&nbsp;mechanics that you are trying to extract the most points from. As you play and come to grips with the game, the more gamerly elements will fall into place, but at the end of the day it's going to be the game's deep engagement with its subject that sells it – so build your relationship with it starting there.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The achievement of the most recent 3 Sierra Madre games (High Frontier, Bios: Megafauna, and Pax Profiriana) is that they've been able to mesh this subject engagement with clean, playable game systems. Previous games – American Megafauna and Lords of the Sierra Madre – took their themes too literally, cramming in representative game systems that turned out to be too many trees, not enough forest. Certainly High Frontier and the subsequent games require rather more player commitment and buy-in than a typical game to be worth the effort, but none are particularly more mechanically daunting than an average high-end euro. I found Pax Porfiriana to be much cleaner-playing and accessible than the complicated and thematically tortured Trajan, the thematic but mechanically clunky Dungeon Lords or Space Alert, or Fantasy Flight's straightforward but badly explained Android: Netrunner or Merchant of Venus, just to pick a few.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(As an aside, Origins: How We Became Human, the first of Sierra Madre's "modern" games, is an odd case. I love the idea behind the game and the systems are clean-playing and evocative. But many details of the game balance seems suspect – Acculturation is a major offender – in ways that make it not fun to play. I'm still in search of a set of tweaks that will let that game deliver on its potential. They must be pretty close at hand somewhere. Fortunately the later games seem to have gotten past this).</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I think of the period covered by the game as a prequel to the great ideological wars of the 20th Century, the Spanish and Russian Civil Wars. Unlike those conflicts, which were full-on wars, Pax Porfiriana is more of a power vacuum. Ruled by a weakening <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porfirio_D%C3%ADaz">Porfirio&nbsp;</a></span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porfirio_D%C3%ADaz">Díaz</a>, Mexico is ready to be pushed in one of four ways.</span><br /><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The key to understanding Pax Porfiriana the first time out, something the rules dramatically fail to explain unless you read the&nbsp;historical&nbsp;background, is the relationship between these four competing factions: the Mexican Federal government of Díaz; the United States; the Mexican local governors, which the game views as akin to modern warlords; and the communist/anarchist rebels. Each faction is keyed by color, and is strongly linked to a "regime" (in the game, the current dominant political environment) and a type of prestige. So, for example, U.S. troops, enterprises, and politicians are blue and tend to fare well in the U.S. Intervention regime, in which the dominant political force is the U.S. actively meddling in Mexican affairs. They are likewise linked to the "Outrage" prestige, in which the U.S. is getting progressively more fed up with the anarchy on its border. Should Díaz be given a shove while the regime is U.S. Intervention, the competition to be Díaz' successor will be decided by Outrage, with a faction that has generated enough becoming governor as the U.S. annexes Mexico. On the flip side, the Communist revolutionaries are red and linked to the Anarchy regime and the Revolution prestige. Anarchy is hard on big&nbsp;businesses&nbsp;(mines and banks) but allows troop cards to move more freely. If Díaz weakens during anarchy and one player has managed to get a big enough share of the revolutionaries and their Revolution prestige points, they can take over after the elections. Díaz will have an opportunity to topple four times during the game, each of which can be under a different regime and so can be affected by different forces.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The relationships between factions, prestige, regimes, and victory are the core of the game and if you can grasp them in the context of the historical event, you will be most of the way to understanding the game. The White local warlords are the easiest: white troop and personality cards will have the Command prestige points directly on them and will themselves enable regime changes to the white Martial Law. Other factions, though, are more complicated: blue U.S. troop cards will change regime to U.S. Intervention, but the Outrage then required for victory will need to be engineered by Mexican elements. Loyalty is required to become Díaz' hand-picked successor should the regime remain in Pax Porfiriana, which can come from a variety of sources including businesses and politicians.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The rest of the game is pretty straight-ahead. Every turn you get actions to draft and play cards. You'll need to build up enterprises (banks, mines, plantations, gun stores) to generate cash. You'll want to recruit troops to protect those enterprises, extort your enemies, and provide political leverage (playing troop card frequently triggers a regime change). While you're doing that,&nbsp;you'll manage a wide variety of other special events, personalities, and institutions driven by action cards. There will be unrest to put down and factional strife. People will be thrown in jail. Lawsuits are filed, enterprises nationalized. The amount of historical detail here is amazing, but it is all built on top of a very clean-playing card game.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I like Pax Porfiriana for a lot of reasons. The main ones are the same reasons I like Republic of Rome: it presents a chaotic period in a chaotic way, with players struggling to navigate an unpredictable political landscape.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Unlike Republic of Rome, it does it with very few actual rules and streamlined gameplay, accomplishing everything Lords of the Sierra Madre did with a fraction of the footprint.</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">With a variety of paths to victory – Loyalty, Revolution, Outrage, and Command – players have flexibility in choosing different thematic paths. It manages to be chaotic without relying on the&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">traditional and</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;unsatisfying crutch of "take that" card play; events tend to mix things up more than simply hammer one player or another. The game rewards a nice balance of planning for the future and rank opportunism.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I think Pax succeeds for me because of this balance and nuance. The game comes with 210-ish cards representing enterprises, troops, personalities, and historical events (all of which are unique). In an average game you'll see maybe 60-80 of them. So each game presents only a slice of the whole environment, and will have a different texture as you have shortages or surpluses of troops or enterprises and some subset of the powerful, game-changing cards show up. On the other hand, its <i>enough</i>&nbsp;cards and a large enough percentage of the total for the game to retain thematic cohesion and present the players with calculated rather than arbitrary risk. Players are not going to be hosed for lack of opportunity – you should not have trouble building up your income and power base to be a player in the game (both of which could be problems in both Bios: Megafauna and Origins).</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;A game which didn't generate enough enterprises or troops or cards of one faction to be interesting is certainly a remote possibility, but it's&nbsp;<i>very</i> remote and worth tolerating.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Especially in light of the game's duration, which is only about 2 hours when played correctly (the first time I played, I&nbsp;misunderstood&nbsp;a rule and we ended up&nbsp;inadvertently&nbsp;playing the Iron Hand variant which can be much longer with more players – 4 hours – and is not recommended). It's enough time to generate action, for players and factions to rise and fall and for the fate of Mexico to be decided, but it's also short enough to leave you wanting more.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So check it out. At only $35 <a href="http://www.sierra-madre-games.com/conflict-simulations/#!/~/product/category=482250&amp;id=14143298">direct from Sierra Madre</a>, there is a lot of game in the compact box.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">---</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'll close with some advice for teaching the game, if you're the one who gets to do that. It's my traditional advice: don't over-focus on mechanisms. Pax Porfiriana is complicated not because the game mechanisms are complicated; they are not. It's the relationships between the cards and the regimes – how the elements in the game are arranged – combined with the large number of options available to the players. So explain the factions, explain a little bit of the history. Because Pax Porfiriana has this different aesthetic, I think having an understanding of what the game is trying to say gives the players more useful context for understanding how to play it than simply running the sequence of play and explaining the individual actions.</span><br /><div id="ynano_hooks_page" style="display: none;"><div id="callsToClient_page" style="display: none;"></div><div id="eventsFromClient_page" style="display: none;"></div></div>Chris Farrellhttps://plus.google.com/107526139736953433093noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-914191259119493058.post-78563739565248414882012-12-09T20:23:00.000-08:002012-12-09T20:23:57.482-08:00Rex: Final Days of the Empire<br /><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Back in the day, I was a huge fan of Avalon Hill's Dune. I must have played it a hundred times in the late 80s to mid 90s, enough to even have played the lousy Spice Harvest, The Duel, Landsraad, and Tleilaxu variants several times (you have to be pretty desperate for some variety to do that). Whenever someone designs some kind of stupid multi-way free-for-all euroish wargame these days (Antike, Space Empires, Sid Meier's Civilization, RuneWars, Conan, etc., etc.) I always feel like screaming “Hey! Dune did this right in 1979! Why are you still doing it wrong?” A terrific combat system, interesting deal-making diplomacy without backstabbing or force-of-personality persuasion, well-paced, with players able to come back after being out of it, and of course a colorfully drawn and faithful interpretation of Herbert's book are amongst the game's great strengths.</span></span><br /> <div style="min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But it fell off out of circulation for me in the mid 90s, largely for one reason: the potentially long and unpredictable playing time. The joke was that a game could last anywhere from 45 minutes to 8 hours. It wasn't really a joke. While most games would finish in a workable 4 hours, the outliers are a problem especially since the fluid game situation can't just be called early and scored – if you've put in the 6 hours, you want to see how it ends.</span></span><br /> <div style="min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When Fantasy Flight announced their Dune remake, sans Dune, I was intrigued mainly because they offered a 3-4 hour playing time. Could Rex get Dune back on the table, and would my fondness for Dune hold up in a truncated version and without the Dune theme? Or would it turn out that It was all nostalgia and my affection for Dune itself, and not so much the game?</span></span><br /> <div style="min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I <a href="http://illuminatinggames.blogspot.com/2012/01/2011-year-in-hobby-games-part-i.html">tore into Fantasy Flight last year</a> for a run of truly wretched game designs, so I approached Rex with some skepticism. They seem to have done the right thing though, and kept the Dune game systems largely intact. Players fight over 5 strongholds on the map. They commit their armies, in the form of tokens, to battle, then win or lose on a combination of card-play and risk: each player decides how many tokens they are willing to lose, what leader to commit, and what weapons and defenses their leader will use. The loser loses everything, the winner loses just what he or she committed. Everything is decided secretly and simultaneously, which is cool, because the game has a lot of hidden information but also a fair amount of "information leakage" – you're likely to have some idea what cards and capabilities your opponent has, but unlikely to have a full picture. Weapons and defenses, along with a variety of special actions, are available each turn in a blind auction, and by blind, I mean around-and-around but you don't actually know what you're bidding on. What really makes the game then is that each faction has a variety of strong player powers that hugely impact the core systems: the Jol-Nar can see cards before they are bid on, the Xxcha can force you to do things you'd prefer not to in battle, the Empire has elite shock troops and collects all the money bid for cards. The game engine itself is fairly straightforward, but all the interesting, thematic, and rule-breaking special powers (mainly through faction’s powers, but also via the cards) are what brings it to life.</span></span><br /> <div style="min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I ended up enjoying Rex more than I expected to. It does however suffer from 3 major problems.</span></span><br /> <div style="min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1223971_lg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="199" src="http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1223971_lg.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><br /><a href="http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic52759_md.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="304" src="http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic52759_md.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Firstly is the expected Fantasy Flight horrifically bad graphic design. Compare the Dune map to the Rex map. Can you even easily see where the 5 victory strongholds are on the Rex map? Game-centric information is lost in a sea of visual clutter. The point-to-point map makes visualization of where the Sol Fleet is going next and which territories are at risk of bombardment hard to see. Again, compare to how clearly the same information (the Storm) is presented on the Dune map. As many will surely point out, it's fine when you get used to it, but graphical missteps pervade the design and introduce a non-trivial risk of game-breaking errors. Case in point: the last game I played, the Jol-Nar player played the whole game thinking she had the Emperor top leader for her traitor because the card background colors are not suitability distinct and not a strong element of the visual design, the reference sheet is unhelpful (the Emperor and Letnev both have 6s for their top leader and the sheet doesn't give names), and leader names have been completely genericized. It's not a mistake you make twice, but lousy presentation design basically ruined the game for her. This mistake would have been completely impossible to make in Dune. While this is a particularly egregious example, there are plenty of ways in which the presentation makes it more likely errors will occur.</span></span><br /> <div style="min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Dw2GkStUSkw/UMVW_MuGUHI/AAAAAAAAAR8/oiv1w_pk7mM/s1600/IMG_0962.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="221" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Dw2GkStUSkw/UMVW_MuGUHI/AAAAAAAAAR8/oiv1w_pk7mM/s320/IMG_0962.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Chani vs. General</td></tr></tbody></table><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Secondly, the Twilight Imperium backstory is almost completely generic and unconvincing and fails to provide any color for the game in a way which actively impedes gameplay. I knew the Twilight Imperium universe was pretty soulless, but I thought perhaps Dune's wonderfully evocative game systems would help bring it to life. One of the truisms about games, as with stories and photography, is that it helps a lot when there are people involved and not just factions or armies. This was one of the great things about the original Dune. When your leaders are Stilgar, Chani, Ortheym, Shadout Mapes, and Jamis, that means something. Even if you haven't read the book, these named characters with distinctive headshots on their large, round pieces build up associations over time and play and can be easily identified. It's been 15 years since I played or read Dune, and I didn't have to look up any of those names. I've payed Rex 5 times in the last 6 months and I couldn't tell you the names of the equivalent leaders; turns out they are Admiral, General, Colonel, Captain, and Commander. I can remember Chani has a 6 battle rating and can get worked up about her being a traitor. Not so much General.</span></span><br /> <div style="min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">While on the topic of the Twilight Imperium universe and its many shortcomings, I also must point out the troubling fact that Rex has almost completely erased women from the game. One of the great things about Dune was all the interesting and colorful female characters (even if they didn't always quite manage to escape genre stereotypes), and the boardgame captured this with 1 female faction leader (out of 6), 8 out of a total 30 leaders, and half the leaders rated 5 or higher. Amongst the book's “good guys”, Lady Jessica is a 5 (tied for the best Atriedes leader) and Chani a 6 (second to Stilgar's 7 amongst the Fremen). All of this has been excised. As near as I can tell, there is one female leader, Sol's Captain, but she just looks like one of the guys and you can't tell from the tiny picture on her leader piece, you need to go to the traitor card. The faction from Dune that was entirely women, the Bene Gesserit, has been replaced by alien turtles – all of whom look male to me, but it's of course a little hard to tell. Out of context it just seems dumb and like needlessly throwing away one of the interesting features of the original. In the context of a hobby with serious gender issues, it's especially frustrating and troubling.</span></span><br /> <div style="min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Lastly, and most seriously, is Fantasy Flight's persistent trouble with game balance. Rex has been admirably tightened up and shortened from the original, which is great. In the process, though, it has made it far too easy for Hacan to win. As with the Guild in the original, Hacan and their allies win if nobody else has when time runs out. With Rex's greater unit replacement rates, easier leader revival, somewhat greater difficulty in playing traitors, and much larger influence (cash) supply, stalling for time and holding off players and alliances pushing for a win has become noticeably easier. Couple that with playing only half as many turns, and Hacan has won all of the 6-player games I've played, and it hasn't really ever been close. The situation is better with 4 or 5 players; 4 in fact may be the sweet spot. Unfortunately, without the tectonic stresses of 5 or 6 factions competing for Rex, the game just isn't as interesting. It becomes more of a tactical game and less of a power struggle.</span></span><br /> <div style="min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Where does that leave Rex for me at the end of the day? I enjoyed it for a little while, and have to give Fantasy Flight their due for bringing this classic back to the table. Unfortunately it just has too many significant issues, and I still own Dune. Mainly it inspired me to break out my old copy of that game, and discover that at WBC they now play only 10 turns instead of 15, which would make for a game of roughly the same length as Rex – and Rex is in no way superior to Dune.</span></span><br /> <div style="min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What about everyone who doesn't have access of the original? Rex is still pretty good by the modern standards of this sort of game – unlike Conan or Sid Meier's Civilization or Space Empires or their ilk, there is an interesting and solid game here (although play Eclipse with the alien races instead if given the choice). Dune itself is a tremendous piece of raw game design, showing how a number of chronic problems with this genre can be solved. While Fantasy Flight has made a number of missteps in adapting it, it's still a strong game, albeit one that will need a house rule to rein in the Hacan. It could have been so much better with more rigorous development and a less boring and sexist backstory, but it's still a game worth playing.</span></span><br />Chris Farrellhttps://plus.google.com/107526139736953433093noreply@blogger.com2